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

“Who’s he?” Mr. Klein kept up a rapid handing over of staples and delicacies. “Who’s they you mean. There’s three of ’em.”

“Oh,” Ira’s gaze followed the stalwart man in the gray fedora. “Where’s three?”

“There. In there with the delivery men. You hear ’em? That’s the boxes they’re strapping. With iron straps. All the booze has got to go tomorrow; everything’s got to be stamped and sealed and with a number. Where the hell is that vanilla?”

“So what’re they gonna do?” Ira picked up the small flask of vanilla, fitted it into a niche in the hamper. “Are they gonna lock everything up again?”

“ Bist mishugeh? They were locked up. They’re goin’ to a bonded warehouse tomorrow.”

“A bonded warehouse.” Events of the past hour began to scatter before wholesome activity. “What’s a bonded warehouse?”

“Don’t stop,” Mr. Klein handed over a package. “From everything right away you want to make a discovery: It’s a place nobody can touch the alcohol, that’s all. Volstead. The Volstead Act. That means Prohibition.”

“Why didn’t you— Why wasn’t you—” Ira wrenched the words free. “My big brother?”

Mr. Klein showed genuine surprise: “Why do you need a big brother?” His sympathy was tentative, unsentimental, but honest. “I thought something was the matter.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s the matter?”

“I got a dirty, rotten, lousy teacher.”

“That’s all? So tell your father.”

Ira fell silent, his throat too tight for utterance.

“All right, I’m your big brother,” Mr. Klein plied his helper with comestibles. “Don’t touch the beer and schnapps tomorrow. That’s my advice.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, it’s a big fine for a minor like you. You’re called a minor. You can’t handle alcohol. You can’t even go near it, you understand? Alcohol — it makes you shikker . Wine, beer. So stay away, whatever anybody else does, stay away— Here, take: watermelon preserves.”

“Tommy too?”

“He’s a goy . Nobody’ll say— No, he’s full-time workin’.” Mr. Klein contradicted himself. “I don’t know how old he is. You, you’re only a schoolboy.”

“I don’t like it anyway.”

“No? All the bekheles wine you don’t drink Pesach ? And a kiddush ? You know what is a kiddush ha shem? Here: Pettypoise peas. Three cans. Together. Mussels. Vichy. No, hell, what am I thinking? I was in France. I drank it. Vichy s-swah. Sugar.”

“ Kiddush , I know. What’s the ha shem ?”

Mr. Klein burst into a laugh. “What’s the ha shem! Oy, bist dee a Yeet ,”

“Well, the wine anyway is like vinegar in my house. Sharp. My mother makes it in like a big pot in the front room.”

“So that means ha shem ,” Mr. Klein said ironically. “Listen, stay away from every kind of bottle tomorrow, you hear? I’m your big brother. There’s gonna be khoisakh in this cellar tomorrow. I can tell already.” He cocked an ear toward the hammering in the wine vault, nodded significantly. “Here: fruit salad. How is it today you’re workin’ like a — like a — like the way you should. Here: a box guava jelly. Next to it. Same order: package tea. Jazz-mine. Another sugar.”

Ira knew he would have no trouble getting Pop to write a note of excuse from school as soon as he heard it would mean his son’s earning a little extra cash. Ever querulous about anything that jeopardized her son’s schooling, it was Mom who demurred, even this slight departure from regularity: “For a paltry shmoolyareh ,” she denigrated, “to fall behind in school. I don’t need it. First of all, I want to see you graduate.”

“Yeah,” Ira scoffed. “From bookkeeping and touch-system typing and stinking shorthand. And—” he brooded, surly a moment, “that rotten Spanish.”

“So why did you take it? Who forced you? I don’t know better, alas; I can’t counsel.” She thumped fleshy hand on bosom, “And he—” her fingers spread open toward Pop reading the Yiddish newspaper at the table, “—knows as much as I—”

“I know he seeks to become a malamut .” Pop looked up.

“Then let him become a malamut . But always before it was Davit Clinton, Davit Clinton High School.”

“Stuyvesant is as good as De Witt Clinton.” Ira felt a recurring surge of resentment “I should never have gone to that lousy junior high.”

“ Noo?”

“Shah! Yenta .” Pop had gotten writing material from the corner under the china closet. “What shall I tell him? First write me down his name.”

“I got a pencil.” Ira declined the proffered penholder. He spelled out the name as he wrote: “L-e-n-n-a-r-d. Mr. Lennard.”

“ Azoy?”

“Yeah. I told him Mom has chronic catarrh and doesn’t speak English, so I have to take her to the clinic—”

“Aha. I don’t need no chronic catarrh. I have to write yet chronic catarrh. Am I a doctor? You have to take her to the clinic. She’s sick. You have to go with her. That’s not enough?”

Sullen, Ira shrugged, the way he always smoothed over Pop’s scorn of his son’s suggestions, knit up his wounded pride. He watched Pop write the date. For so slight a man as Pop was, his script had the doughtiest of flourishes. “Dear is with an ‘a,’ no?”

“Yeh, d-e-a-r.”

“Today a half-day, tomorrow a whole one,” said Mom. “I won’t stand for it.”

“There won’t be any again. I’m gonna quit soon.”

“Aha!” Pop uttered brusque satire. “Shoyn? Enough. The task is ended? You’re already spent?”

“I’m not spent. Everybody says they’re gonna close anyhow. I told you.”

“Then you have to lead the way. What else?”

“Let him be,” Mom interceded. “Whatever he earned, he earned. That was all to the good.”

“But his five dollars a week you grabbed at once.”

“Then I’m the loser, not you.”

“You lead him. Let us see if he ends where you hope.” Pop signed the slip with an inch-high Herman Stigman. “Here’s your notel,” he added in Yiddish diminutive.

Ira folded the paper silently. How could you breach Pop’s contempt? How could you confide: Like yesterday, say, my teacher did this, my teacher did that. You know what he did? Right away it would be his fault, not Mr. Lennard’s: Why did you let him do it? Why didn’t you run out? No, maybe he was wrong. Maybe Pop would write a note, the way he did to Mr. O’Reilly when the shop-teacher cracked Ira on the ear. But then, Mom: Right away, Oy, gevald! The outcry that would ensue: Gevald geshrigen! Outlandish Jewish outcry. Nah.

— It was because you already felt guilty, wasn’t that the chief reason?

Yes, because I might betray something even more heinous than Mr. Lennard’s molestation.

— Isn’t it time you cleared the air, exposed the clandestine burden? You can’t go on indefinitely in this fashion, with an unaccountably eccentric orbit, like a visible astral body with an invisible satellite. Beside, the enigma is beginning to wear thin.

Very well. Soon.

XXIV

Eagerly, Ira greeted Farley, when the two met down in the school basement a few minutes before the bell rang. How much he needed Farley’s cheerfulness, his laugh. If only he could tell Farley: Mr. Lennard tried to jerk me off. Then how do you know about jerking off? Mr. Lennard tried to pull me off. Then how do you know about pulling off? All right, Mr. Lennard played with my dink; he took his out and tried to make me get a hard-on — ah, then what, then what? Farley would say what to do. Maybe tell someone else. Then what? Ah, the hell with it. Mr. Lennard was excusing him from school this afternoon. That was all that mattered. Ira told Farley about the permission he had received from Mr. Lennard to skip school after lunch — and about the liquor to be moved from the cobwebby vault down in a corner of the cellar of the store: