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

Walk.

Through the crowded, noisy, fitful avenue, past indifferent landmarks, the Flatiron Building, past hectic intersections, Herald Square, Times Square, onward plodding: Columbus Circle, dully recognizing the changing character of the neighborhood, from commercial to apartment house, from utilitarian building to ornate, many-storied, multi-balconied edifice. At 96th Street, he quit Broadway, turned west toward the Hudson, entered on the lofty viaduct above the riverbank. On the paved paths down below — mothers, nursemaids, tending prams, the infants in them so snugly, colorfully bundled against the variable, brisk river wind. Strollers. That man twisting his mustache tighter, the way Mom twisted the end of a thread before addressing the eye of the needle. How enjoyable was every sight and sound, if every sight and sound didn’t drag a lead weight after it. Look at the water of the broad Hudson, choppy, whitecaps nicked out of the cold gray river by the wind.

The Palisades across the river, with the huge Domino Sugar clock on the face of the bluff, giant hands telling the time: between 3:45 and 4:00 P.M. He could imagine the clock like a vast branding iron, every moving minute, every trailing hour, searing into his memory. He had walked until his legs had grown sluggish, bare hands grown cold, fingers cramped gripping the useless near-empty briefcase. He sat for a while on the green park bench, rested just long enough so that when he got to his feet again sinews had stiffened, joints ached. He trudged on. The sun slanted, abandoning the cliffs to long shadows, shadows that whetted the breeze to a cold edge. It would soon be lamplighting time, soon be gloaming. The paved walks below had all become deserted, a bare, desolate net of dim paths of pavement thrown over the sloping, darkened lawns that separated the empty, silent river below from the auto traffic on the viaduct above, the viaduct where he plodded. As if hoarding the waning light, the steel tracks of the New York Central freight lines gleamed on their dull gray beds of gravel, metallic streaks dividing river from land, the river that lapped against the massive blocks of granite, sustaining the railroad bed, blocks dumped higgledy-piggledy into the water.

Just a few years ago, he had gone swimming there with the Irish bunch in the street, gone in all innocence, in the years of trust and innocence. They wouldn’t let the other few Jewish kids on the block come along.

“We don’t want youse Jew-boys wid us,” Grimesy snarled at Davey, Izzy, Benny. But him they had accepted. Why? Why had they let him go with them?

And afterward, when they had dried off, and put their clothes on to go home, a cattle train full of steers passed, the animals lowing behind the bars of their rolling pens, rolling toward the abattoir downtown. They threw rocks at them, the bunch of Irish kids did, at the parched beasts on a sweltering afternoon on their way to be killed. Ira had felt a pang, then. Always thoughtless cruelty became unfunny; the glee leaked out of it as if he himself were the butt of it, the victim. He couldn’t help it. Maybe because of Mom, maybe because he was a Jew.

There was the path, there, upstream, that they used to take; you could barely see it now, serpentine through the dead grass, under leafless yet feathery-thickening trees, there; it reappeared like a slash down the steepest slope to the railroad tracks. Oh, he had gone that way a dozen times: nine years old, ten years old, eleven years old — when was the infantile paralysis year? Swam and soaked the disease-preventive camphor balls Mom had tied in a little bag about his neck. He should never have grown older. The words came out in English out of the oft-heard Yiddish with their malicious twist: “ Zolst shoyn nisht elter vern .” And now, too late, he would leave the viaduct to take the same path again: Zolst shoyn nisht elter vern . . There it was, just as when he was nine and ten and eleven. Follow it. . Follow it through the grass, down the slope, not so steep as it looked, across the clean, shiny tracks on the ties on the gravel, across the shiny tracks unfazed by the frowning ties on the busy gravel. . crunching footsteps to the tumbled river-rocks where the water dyed their margins darker than the dry granite above. Sun sheared off now, lopped off by the Palisades. Domino Sugar clock; what time was it as he made his way? Past the secluded, jagged little pools of water in the crevices of the giant jumble of rock. Here was the flat rock off which everybody dove. Flat rock, diving rock, curl your toes around the edge and belly-whop into the cool river. “An’ no wires, or nothin’ underwater to get tangled in,” said Feeny, and everyone agreed. What had he done? What would happen to him now?

He couldn’t think, that was his trouble. So he would be expelled from Stuyvesant; so his good name would be ruined. So he would be known as a thief, as a goniff . He alone knew that before; now it would be known by all. . And what if, what if he also knew, it were also known, that he had been caught too, committing something worse than theft, an abomination? As it well might be, but a single slip. Then throw your briefcase into the water now. Forestall everything: if he threw his briefcase into the water, he’d have to jump after it to get it back. And then? He wouldn’t have to think about anything anymore. Sure, the water was cold, gravel-color cold. It would sting. But if he took a deep breath, a real, tired deep breath. . in the water. . it might all be over. . before the water got through his clothes. . his secondhand topcoat, his secondhand jacket. What was there to be afraid of? He might not even feel it. Anybody could slip off a rock in the river, even a flat one. . like this. . just swing the briefcase into the restless, dented water, as far as you can, into the water, rippling all the way to the gloomy Palisades. Come on. Soon be dark, and no more nerve. If he could only think. Yisgadal, v’yiskadash, sh’mey rabo , the mourner’s chant, was that how it went? What did it mean? That’s how it sounded. Pop would sit on a wooden box, the way he did when his father died, after he learned about it in a letter from Europe, slit the buttonhole of his vest with an old Gem razor blade, and sit on a box, sit shiva . And Mom, Mom, Mom! Wait—

Wait: now he knew. The river had just told him. He didn’t have seykhl enough to discover it by himself. It didn’t matter. It was true. No, it wasn’t loony; it was true. If it wasn’t true, then nothing was true; and if nothing was true, what difference did anything make? But here he was, standing with his briefcase on the diving rock on the Hudson, with his briefcase to throw in the water before it was nighttime. Why would he be standing here if it didn’t make any difference? If nothing was true? Then something was true. Here he was, at day’s end living; in a moment to drown.

He turned around on the block of stone, turned his back to the river. So now suffer. Everything. The outcries at home. The expulsion from school. The shame. That was only the outside, the outside wreckage. What he was, what he already was inside, he would have to bear. He didn’t know what he meant, only that the agony would be worse, and he had chosen to bear it, bear the havoc of himself, the only thing true. .

He climbed up toward the paved, lonely, darkling lanes, went underneath the viaduct, went on toward Broadway, into motor-din, store-light, headlights, human cries; he plodded south. It would be a long way to 119th Street, a long way to Park Avenue. But that was nothing compared to what lay in store for him. Just a long hike compared to what waited at the end. . just a long hike — nothing, compared to destination. . Yes, what was anything compared to himself?

III