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

He had earned enough money for Mom to buy him his clothes for the coming school year: a few pieces of underwear — BVDs — socks, a pair of cheap shoes, and enough secondhand outergarments to last until he again brought home wages next summer. And how unabashedly she haggled with the secondhand clothes dealer on 114th Street, flushed with indignation, holding up to the light the seat of the touted pants to exhibit the worn fabric — heedless of the shopkeeper’s disclaimers and Ira’s cringing complaints. With his raiment provided, Ira felt excused from further responsibility for his own welfare until next year. Food and shelter, a bed to sleep in, he took that for granted; it was his by virtue of his parents’ obligation — or really, Mom’s obligation, since she was so dedicated to his getting an education. The carfare too, the dime she tendered him every day for transportation to and from high school, he felt equally complacent about. Hadn’t he contributed sufficiently to his present source of supply when he worked in the summer? Apparel was the one thing that — to his way of thinking — didn’t accrue naturally in the household, demanded supplemental cash, cash from the outside, cash that it was his duty to earn. And he had earned enough to defray the cost of secondhand raiment. He had discharged his duty. And as soon as he believed he had done so, he felt he was entitled to quit the job, to loaf with clear conscience.

So with bathing suit wrapped in a towel to form a small bundle, and the bundle tucked under his arm, Ira strolled west through 125th Street’s shopping mart, its string of one-story shops, west, under the Sixth Avenue El, west, to the soaring, dark 125th Street subway overpass, and under it all the way to the St. George’s ferry slip at the Hudson River shore. That was as far as shank’s mare could take him. From there he had to board the ferry, which cost a nickel, and ride to the other side of the river, the New Jersey side at the foot of the Palisades. A highway ascended to the Palisades, but partway up, an avenue branched off through a residential section, and here he would hike north, above the river and parallel to it, hike along a narrow sidewalk by comfortable homes set back on sloping lawns, under the shade of trees in the full leaf of late summer. And now and then note a house rising in quiet affluence from curved, paved driveways where motorcars were parked.

America, flourishing, prosperous, where modish women in picture hats pulled on long white gloves as they walked to their automobiles. Almost without benefit of words, but as if thoughts were clouds imbued with meaning, he would mull on the imponderable gulf that separated him from everything he beheld — and was enchanted by — that separated him, the immigrant, from the American-born, the Jew from the gentile. Oh, it was more than just that, Ira would ruminate. To be the kind they were you had to come from the kind they were a long, long time. Always. No old Jews with whiskers, no Shloime Farb with his forked gray beard, clearing his throat luxuriantly as he bent over the Torah scrolls, Shloime Farb in top hat on Shabbes , no cheder , scant as the memory was, East Side pushcarts, babble of Yiddish, matzahs and Moses in the Haggadah engraving clubbing the felled Egyptian taskmaster. This world had no warm Yom Kippur afternoons strolling past the ground-floor synagogue, no feeble old Jews in their shrouds prostrating themselves in atonement — scary — nothing to flaw the wholeness of the kind they were who lived in those well-kept homes beneath the trees where he walked. And worst of all, he was sure, he was sure, no secret canker had already begun to mar the contented wholesomeness they seemed to possess when he saw them clipping the hedges about their neat, elevated lawns, or seated in vivacious conversation opposite each other in their swinging gaily striped chairs. No. Their heartiness, their soundness, removed them.

A mile or so he would ramble thus along the tree-lined avenue — until he came to a painted arrow that marked the entrance to a path downhill whose other end opened on an artificially sandy beach. It was a privately owned swimming area on the Hudson, complete with dressing room, lockers, and a diving platform extending into the river. A fee of ten cents was charged for the use of a locker; otherwise, admission to the dressing room was free. There, Ira would change to his two-piece bathing suit, deposit his clothes in an out-of-the-way spot outdoors, walk to the sandy beach, and swim out into the “clean,” pleasantly brackish depths of the wide Hudson estuary. He was a good swimmer. His roly-poly build, so often disadvantageous in land sports, served to advantage in water. He would swim out to the rusting hulks of the Liberty ships, quondam military transports during the Great War, now idly tugging at the moorings in midstream. Airplanes, pontoon planes, were often anchored partway between the rusting ships and the shore, and Ira would hang on to a strut or guy wire for a breather. And once, while he was perched on a pontoon, a navy patrol boat churned up, and an officer ordered him to clear off. He did, but in his haste to comply, he dove off — and struck his head against something solid, was stunned, but managed to stay afloat until he recovered enough to swim back to shore.

Alone, so rash and alone, and often far from shore, from rescue, had he been the victim of serious accident, or been seized by cramp, he would certainly have drowned. And always in those spasms of momentary panic, when he imagined some Leviathan under him, or bucking the combined flow of river current and outgoing tide, when dry land seemed unattainable, he always thought of Mom: he shared in her inconsolable grieving for him.

“Why do I let you go?” she said to Ira more than once, so often that her words would remain fixed in his heedless mind. “I don’t know myself why I do. I let you go because you have to learn about America. You must learn alone, because help you I can’t. Neither I nor your father.” And she would laugh ruefully. “Mrs. Shapiro chides me that I’m like a goya . ‘You have a heart of stone,’ she says. ‘A stony heart like a goyish mother.’ She doesn’t know. If I lost you I would fall lifeless. I go about numb until you come home.”

Too late to enroll in the current term, Ira had enrolled in the summer session of the night high school — at the very same large gray school building he had passed so often — and would again — on his way to and from the Lenox Avenue subway station on 116th Street. Second-year English, his junior high school record entitled him to take, second-year Spanish, and elementary algebra. After oppressive, sultry, electric-lit classrooms, sauntering through 116th Street, the crosstown trolley thoroughfare and the Jewish shopping equivalent to goyish 125th Street. He would saunter along with other working youth, as if he too were on his own as they were, and not just temporarily thrown in with them, bantering, chatting — about what? Classes, courses, jobs.

Ira could recall one exchange distinctly. He was sharply reproved by a gentile student — already a young man, several years older than he was — for some facetious remark he made impugning Calvin Coolidge. Ingratiating himself, as usual, when with gentiles, by recourse to mild Jewish denigration, he said humorously that Jews called Coolidge “Koilitch,” which was the Yiddish word for stale challah , day-old Sabbath loaf, because it was so dry and colorless. His night-school classmate’s rejoinder was prompt and pointed: Jews of all people had no business making light of the man who had led the country into its greatest period of prosperity. “Look at the way business is booming,” he averred. “And who’s getting the most benefit out of it? The Jews. That’s the trouble with them. They don’t know when they’re well off.” He was so emphatic in his condemnation that Ira made no reply.