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

“ Sweet Adeline, my Adeline, ” the Irish and Italian half-grown youths his age sang at night before the lighted window of Biolov’s drugstore near the corner of Park Avenue, harmonizing above the muted rumble of trains, “ each night I pray that you’ll be mine. ” Ira was much further along than most of them were, much further in wickedness, evil, unspeakable evil. And such self-awareness did what to him? It barred him from the exercise of run-of-the-mill, of street-average thrills. “G’wan,” Petey Hunt prompted in his tough, side-mouthed, Irish way, encouraging Ira to make his move toward plain, freckled Helen standing in the tenement doorway of a summer evening. “G’wan, ask her for a lay. We all laid her. She’ll give ye a lay.”

“No.” Ira shrank back.

Already undone. Always on that same amber screen, Ira would see enacted the moment when the irrevocable wrenching of his life began, the unutterable, shattering ecstasy that twisted his being out of shape, forever. It was like that experiment Mr. Goldblum had conducted in the eighth grade to demonstrate to the startled class the pressure of the atmosphere. Suddenly the shiny gallon can crumpled — everlastingly out of shape. He had done it; it had happened: the smooth, regular container became deformed.

What had happened to him was cross-grained, unnatural, a ruinous deflection. It was the blacks who had taught him just how awkward he was, the blacks he was to work with as a laborer on WPA projects. He would tell himself the same thing later that he was telling himself now. In the natural course of things, of slum life, of slum vitality, slum venery, when Mrs. G, Jewish, deserted by the ultra-Orthodox husband she couldn’t abide, leaned on her broom in her shift and, wan and forlorn, gazed at him from her window across the street, across the street and a flight up from the sidewalk, like his. That was when a black kid of fifteen or sixteen, his own age then, might have gone over on blatant pretext to put his hunch to the test.

But you couldn’t. Ira argued with himself: you couldn’t. You would have had the spunk knocked out of you by Pop.

Yes, but when did this ruinous deflection occur? Not before his parents moved to Harlem in 1914, but afterward. Why blame Pop — or blame Pop alone? Think of what disaster Mom contributed, the very bane itself.

Blame them? Yes and no. Blame, try to fix it on anyone; it slides off. The crux of the matter is or was — and we are back at it again — that severance from folk, that severance from homogeneity that — beatings by Pop or not — would have allowed multiform exit, multiform access to the diversity in unity of the surrounding milieu.

In the primitive typescript which he had written in 1979, Ira had set down the following:

“The tried and true, or should one say, the trite and true figure of speech to describe the function of what is to follow is that of the keystone; without it, the subsequent narrative tumbles to the ground. And yet, it is this particular and essential keystone that for a long time I sought to substitute for with a makeshift. In other words, that I stubbornly balked at using because of its shameful disclosure of the character of friend Ira Stigman.

“I have been three days debating with myself, consenting one day, refusing the next, and in the end, consenting again. My acquiescence. I believe, is not owing to scantiness of fictive ingenuity in finding plausible expedients that would still preserve the integrity of the arch. But militating against such subterfuge, unfortunately, is that in the preceding account, I prepared for the introduction of the genuine article, prepared for it so strongly by the prominence I accorded my bosom companion, Farley Hewin, my cheery, staunch refuge from ruined Jewishness, that, in spite of my self-recrimination, the logic of the commitment brooks no departure from veracity.”

II

Worsening the situation of his bad grades, literally disastrous for him, was the fact that Ira in this new school kept losing things — his possessions — invariably because of inattention, carelessness, failure to keep strict guard over his property. And the moment his vigilance lapsed, the articles disappeared; they were appropriated, stolen. His entire briefcase, as his book satchel was called, the new walrus-hide briefcase Tanta Mamie had bought for him as a graduation present, which he had treasured unused until he went to a “real” high school, the briefcase and its contents, books, notebooks, mechanical drawing aids, all disappeared. He came home blubbering, anticipating the storm of recrimination such loss would provoke. And it did. Mom and Pop volleyed the cost of replacement at each other — and at him. Only his sneakers hadn’t been taken, for the simple reason he hadn’t packed them into his briefcase that day, because there was no gym. So it went, even afterward, when his briefcase was replaced: sometimes a protractor would be taken, sometimes a compass, sometimes a ruler. And always he kept losing his fountain pens, one after the other, all those presented him at his Bar Mitzvah, and even the Waterman that Max bestowed on him later, a unique fountain pen with a retractable gold pen point. All, all went, purloined the minute he left them unguarded.

School attendance became sown with pitfalls, nightmarish at times. Every hour, every day, contained its start of anxiety, frantic search, rancorous reassurance — and too often the savage anguish of loss. Worries over his possessions thudded into his inattentiveness, and his inattentiveness seemed to become ever more habitual, an invincible caesura of consciousness. . goddamn dope, forever daydreaming, woolgathering. Bad enough, but the fantasizing was far worse, his cunning conspiring to fulfill his fantasy. It was like a thickening shadow across the delight he felt being in the same school with Farley, a thickening shadow blotting out the vicarious glory of being Farley’s boon companion. He began to steal.

In vindictive fury at first, after he rushed back from the hall at change of class, to find his fountain pen gone from the groove on the desk in which he had left it — only a minute before! His last and only fountain pen! Lousy bastards, sonofabitch bastards! He’d get even. He’d snitch someone else’s pen. Frig him, whoever he was. . And what a cinch it turned out to be! Nothing to it. It was so easy, he’d get another one. Never have to worry about fountain pens anymore. Once you did it, had the nerve to do it, once was all that you needed to learn the knack; at the beginning of the gym period everyone divested himself of his jacket, changed shoes for sneakers, and went out on the gym floor to begin calisthenics. Ira loitered behind. Brushing, as if by accident, against a nearby jacket, exposing the inner breast pocket, brought to light the clip of a fountain pen. It took only an instant to extract, and in an instant the pen was his — his, and slipped safely into his own pants pocket.

“And thus he became predator.” Ira read the words of his first draft, the yellow typescript beside him: became! He could feel the grim sneer that bent his own lips: he became a predator from that day on. Ira appended the text: “Indeed, it seems to me not in the matter of fountain pens alone, but as if their theft was symptomatic of the metamorphosis the entire psyche was already undergoing.”

Ah, yes, the point I was about to make, Ecclesias, and then forgot, as often happens to the writer, and probably more often to the aged one; so that the intended aside seems like a luxury, a self-indulgence. I once wrote a novel, as you know well, Ecclesias, when I was young.

— Yes?

And the poor little nine-year-old tyke was victimized by the society around him, by forces in the environment around him, the good little nine-year-old tyke I might have written.