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

Together, they quizzed Ira, at the same time as they briefed him about what they expected of him. Did he intend to go back to school? Experience had already taught Ira the answer to that one. Oh, no, he assured Mr. Stein, he had quit school for good. They needed somebody all year round. They needed somebody who was quick to learn, somebody with a good head, because they had a big inventory with hundreds of different items in different bins, and somebody who was wide awake and honest and careful. Ira gave them Park & Tilford as a reference, stressing that he had learned the location of hundreds of items down in the cellar. Of course, the P&T store uptown had closed, and he was out of a job. His half-truth bore some weight. And further, they wanted somebody who was not afraid of a little hard work (pronounced “ard-vark” by the owner). Oh, no, not he.

Although the son remained darkly skeptical, the father hired Ira:

“Vee’ll geeve you a chence,” he decided. The wages would be eight dollars and fifty cents a week, payable Saturday afternoon.

That first day he worked there, that first day he was hired, was already Saturday. Then he had been led into a contradiction again: payday on Saturday; and if so, why hadn’t he been paid? Had he worked too short a time, or wasn’t Saturday payday? Answer he could find none. Only that the few cents with which Mom had supplied him to go job-hunting, now that he had found one, he expended on buying lunch, and skimpy enough it was. When time came to hie him home, he had no carfare — and as usual was reluctant to ask. Why? Too deeply submerged in the past to fathom now. One nickel. Did he fear refusal? Did it mean to the kid that he was betraying some kind of weakness in having made no provision for a subway ride home? Did it deflate his seemingly sturdy self-reliance, hint at schoolboy dependence? God knows.

The kid hoofed it all the way from 15th Street to 119th Street. Over a hundred blocks in a straight line: five miles, as they reckoned it in New York, and this at the end of most of a day’s work. The hike didn’t hurt him, of course, borne along on those young, resilient legs, legs wearying only toward the end, the last few blocks of pavement over which he forged ahead with the single-minded resolve of a homing pigeon. He could see himself in the kaleidoscope of passage, in the shade of buildings in the late sun of late spring, see his straining face among the other innumerable faces and figures limned for an instant on the storefronts he strode past, as if progressing along a system of ill-reflecting mirrors. And turning the corner, at last, around the Phoenix Cheese Company’s wholesale depot at Lexington Avenue into familiar 119th Street, his own sleazy street, his shelter, his home.

Why did he remember chiefly the unpleasant, the disastrous incidents connected with the job, Ira queried himself, the all-too-frequent mishaps of which he was the cause? Why was he so intent on proving he was a shlemiel ? For no other reason than that he was. It was not a case of his protesting too much; he simply was. Ah, yes, wonderful: Ses ailes de géant l’empêche de marcher .

Who was to know that? Strangely enough, his blunders and casualties infuriated the younger Mr. Stein far more than the father. The senior Mr. Stein seemed not so much amused with Ira as always on the verge of being amused: what antic would he furnish next? It was Mortimer who made life miserable for Ira, made him so continually ill at ease that he virtually guaranteed Ira’s commission of some egregious slip, which in turn vindicated Mortimer’s rancor as it stoked further cause. Ira broke unbreakable dolls. He stepped into whole cartons of fragile Christmas-tree baubles. Immediately after, he spied the older man at his desk wheezing alarmingly with averted face: “Die insurinks vill pay for it,” he said indulgently to his son, who, Ira supposed, wanted him fired at once. “My madicine dey don’t pay for. So — de yold is better vie madicine.”

But Mortimer was not to be appeased. One afternoon, returned from lunch, when he was at his most sluggish, Ira was called on to help Mortimer unload a big case of teddy bears. And while Mortimer stood high above his helper, one foot on a stepladder, the other on an upper bin, Ira tossed him teddy bears to stow away at the very top tier of the shelves. And Ira’s aim astray more than once, Mortimer had to catch himself and the teddy bear at the same time. Suddenly, as Ira bent over to get at the bottom layer of teddy bears, whack! a teddy bear bounced off his skull. No teddy bear could ever make an impact that hard by merely being dropped — of that Ira was sure. It had to be aimed and hurled — deliberately and with maximum force. And even though Mortimer, high on his perch near the ceiling, served up a conciliating smile and an unconvincing “I’m sorry,” Ira resolved to quit. That Saturday he did, without notice.

Ah, what it would have been like, Stigman — Ira let his head loll back — without the canker, susceptible to all phases of existence, unaware, or scarcely, of the poverty, of the penury and the squalor all about you? What else did the kid know, besides what he perceived, what he discerned within the confines of the slum his milieu? Mostly those things that books told him, the too often insubstantial library-world, at a far remove from his own. Still, the mind did open sometimes upon literary avenues, and some were feasible, might reward the traveler for his journey.

We go this way only once, said Thoreau; and he, Ira, had all but gone to the end of that way already. Nonetheless, it was a privilege to reconstruct the route, and on a computer. Could Ira repress that, that which now strove for utterance? No, he couldn’t. It was the consequence of his having taken a half-tablet of Percodan, Percodan, which always tended to make him loquacious. Millie M, Marcello’s wife, had given him Jane Eyre to read, the first and only Brontë novel he had ever read — and he could hear the quality of her prose pulse in his. A hundred and forty years ago she lived. She died in childbirth, but she spoke to him now, her spirit still alive and vital, toiling at the same craft, speaking through the medium of the same craft, speaking with a fine, vibrant woman’s voice over a span of a century and a half, relating what it was to be alive then, imparting a sense of life through all the fuddy-duddy tags of religiosity, gothic implausibilities, supernatural folderol, bursting through Freud and the grave, through custom, culture, ethos, to impart a sense of the young woman of her time to an old man of his. And now look ahead — he thought — look ahead 140 years. Say Kaddish not only for your grandchildren, but for your great-grandchildren; rend your garments now, sit humbled by bereavement, sit shiva —which you never have done for the living — in a word, mourn for the unborn, for the departed of the future.

In that utterly changed world of 2125, with its changed mores, changed ambience, changed awareness, will any look back at you? Look back from a humanity whose nature you can scarcely guess at now: more extraordinarily different probably than Jane Eyre’s world was from yours. Still, the only holistic world they will have to look back at will be such as this, through all the lame and ludicrous anachronisms — this mélange of fact and fiction. A hell of a lot of difference a misplaced year is going to make 140 years from now. Indeed, Ecclesias, if you wish to know, you have much to be grateful for in this digression. Not only because it relieves the heart, but it illuminates mortality in continuity, or continuity in mortality, reconciles the soul, yes, a very little bit, the human soul to its fate. So, let this be an indefinite interlude. .

VII