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

Prosperous Fifth Avenue. . He trudged south. This part of Fifth Avenue always seemed fat to him, fat and prosperous: like chicken schmaltz . Full of “all-rightnicks,” complacent, well-fed, contented Jewish people. Fat couples in summer wear with their kids licking ice cream cones. Even the stores and the restaurants looked prosperous, looked fat. Only he, mopey he, threaded among the self-satisfied strollers, discontented. So. . that. . anh. . that yearned-for passage, passage from himself to them, Mom’s relatives, was barred, utterly untenable. The longed-for communion, lost sense of belonging that gnawed at him, almost without his knowing, ever since leaving 9th Street, that he hoped they would provide, the way Uncle Louie did, so briefly, with his sympathy and understanding, his largesse and laughter, they never would, they never could provide. Ludicrous to think so. The new kind of loneliness that he had begun to feel ever since coming to Harlem deepened. Grotesque greenhorns his delightful envisagings had become. What a dope.

He entered the park: sunny, restless ripples on the lake, rowboats floating on spangles of water, troubling the smother of reflected brilliance. Shifting pedestrians, noisy kids running about, infants in prams, mothers seated on the green benches, admonishing, gossiping, couples sauntering. Two paths opened before him as soon as he entered the park, two paved walks diverged. He could take the one that skirted the lake west toward the boathouse. He could take the other that skirted the lake toward the south. To walk west was to walk parallel to 110th Street, parallel to the car tracks on which the electric “dinky” ran, the little, lurching, battery-powered crosstown trolley that everybody made fun of. To walk south was to walk “downtown.” To Ira, 110th Street was a kind of subjective southern border of Harlem. The sprawling Harlem Casino, used for Jewish marriages, fancy Bar Mitzvahs, and other special occasions, that stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th seemed the anchor of the solid rows of choice elevator apartments that stretched from Fifth Avenue west, imposing elevator apartments of eight or ten stories, in a solid front toward Lenox Avenue and Seventh Avenue, all the way to the imaginary west boundary of Harlem, the lofty El curving in charcoal sweep around the northwest corner of the park. Beyond that, affluent Central Park West became workaday Eighth Avenue.

Ira already had determined these boundaries, determined his own boundaries, because he had no one to ask, because he had scouted the precincts alone. Alone; that was altogether different from the way he had reconnoitered the environs of 9th Street when they first moved in, always, always in company of other kids, Izzy or Moish or Ziggy or Hersh or Yussie. With one or another or all, almost in awe they had stood in the shadow of the dark, brooding Fulton Street Fish Market under the bridge to Brooklyn, the looming gas tanks on East 14th Street, like huge drums by the drumstick smokestacks. Or the other docks on the East River, where you could watch scows with all kinds of cargo aboard, lumber or coal or cobblestones, shepherded by different tugboats to their moorings, see the great hemp hausers looped around the iron stanchions. Or hie westward to Avenue A, and the Free Baths with the slippery tile floors. Ah. But now solitary.

In whichever direction one chose to go after entering the park, west or south, one walked alongside the iron-pipe fence that bounded the small lake. On the other side of the lake, a bosom of stone swelled up from the water, a granite bosom, surmounted by shrubs and trees that grew thicker and thicker until they met the sky at the top in a high, shady grove. The grove seemed to beckon, offering seclusion in keeping with his own sense of isolation. He walked south, skirting the lake, until he came to a paved walk leading upward. . Stone steps and paved walk and stone steps once more, until he reached the summit. From there, narrow wooded trails led down toward the lake, patches of whose glittering water he could glimpse from above. From the summit too he could see the facades and windows of apartment houses on 110th, and even a “dinky” trolley jigging along its tracks. It had rained the day before, and near at hand, rills still ran through channels over bits of twigs and last year’s brown leaves.

He was thirsty. And yet, not so thirsty he couldn’t easily have waited until he got back to the faucets in the kitchen of Zaida and Baba’s new house. But his thirst seemed bound up with vague new longing spawned by disenchantment, as if intense disappointment distilled its own anodyne to assuage it. Fancy suddenly imbued him. Fancy suddenly buoyed him up, lifted him high above despond, scattered disgruntlement: He was a Scout, lone explorer in trackless America, self-sufficient, resourceful and intrepid, roving through the visionary land, and arrived at this rivulet in the primeval forest. For a moment the countervailing thought crossed his mind that the rill at his feet might have been peed in; though it looked clear, maybe wasn’t safe to drink. But he had to be resolute — he was a bold, buckskin-clad Scout, the wide-ranging explorer, slipping silent as a shadow through the trackless wild: He had pledged himself to a new resolve, to a new “pledge allegiance,” a new covenant he couldn’t name, an American covenant; he had to drink to confirm it: Kneeling, he bent facedown to streamlet, sipped a few mouthfuls. .

IV

It was still vacation time, a few days before school, P.S. 103, opened. So persistently had Ira nagged Mom to revisit 9th Street, to revisit the East Side — out of a longing grown all the more intense now that he found himself in Irish-dominated 119th — that she finally consented. Truth was she too wanted to meet old neighbors and acquaintances in the old surroundings. On a morning before Labor Day, he and Mom made ready to go.

Spruced up, in fresh blouse, best knee-pants, he skipped along beside Mom in happy jaunt as the two walked east along 116th Street all the way to the Second Avenue El station, where Pop had directed them to go. There they boarded the almost-empty train, rode downtown on clacking wheels, stopping at countless local stations, while Ira, jubilant, kneeled on the straw-colored train seat and gazed out of the open window at the roofs and rusting metal eaves of the rows and rows of low, dull brick houses that lined the El route.

They came at last to the 8th Street station! Scarcely heeding her admonitions to be careful, Ira skipped down the El stairs to the street, beyond the farthest boundary of his and his friends’ wanderings, Second Avenue; still, even from there he could already descry to the east familiar landmarks: First Avenue, the green corner of the little park on Avenue A, where the Free Baths were, where he and Izzy and Heshy and Mutke and the other East Side kids dowsed under showers during the summer, slid on their pink butts for a sleigh ride over the slippery tiles.

They walked on; and soon he was in his old haunts, Avenue C, with its lines of pushcarts and stir and gabble of haggling and cry of wares — in Yiddish — and flow of crowd of shoppers, Jewish crowd, hands waggling and whiskers prominent. Already he could see the tall red-brick house — his! — on the corner of Avenue D. . the windows up there near the edge, high, his, and a little patch of the river, the cool East River always at beck, beyond the junkyards with the carrion stink of dead cats, where they played follow-the-leader over old boilers and scrap machinery, past the blacksmith shop reeking of seared hooves, and that little wooden house where the sandy-haired Polish janitor’s kid had called him a sheeny; and Ira’s, “Wait, till I get you downstairs.” How bold he had been then, a good fighter, the other kids said; and he had posed for his tintype with fists outstretched in approved boxer’s stance: had to hide under the bed and listen to Mom lie that he wasn’t home, when some irate mother of a kid whose nose Ira had bloodied came storming up to the house. And now he had become apprehensive, he had become uneasy.