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

Though he made no close friends in school, he drew nearer to Jewish acquaintances, new and old, on 119th Street. The street had changed in character over the years, since that day in 1914 when he and his parents had moved in — as he had changed from that pugnacious little East Side Jewish kid then to his present indeterminate Harlem self today. The street had in the intervening years become largely Jewish — with a Jewish grocery store in the middle, a kosher butcher shop across the street, a tailor shop too that was Jewish. A new candy store had opened in the middle of the block. In the back of it, strident pinochle games took place. And on the corner and around it on both sides along Park Avenue a Jewish greengrocer, Jewish butter-and-egg store, a Jewish hardware store, notions, and other minuscule Jewish gesheftn of that sort. Those Irish families who hadn’t quit the neighborhood before the influx of Jews, who had chosen to stay on and live in tenements predominantly Jewish, had retreated to the block of red-brick, three-flight cold-water flats near Lexington Avenue. Next to the five-flight tenements of gray brick and brown, under their imposing eaves, the short block of red dwellings looked dwarfish indeed; and they were old as well, perhaps the oldest houses on the street, judging by the intriguing iron stars each had on its front, ornamental bolts at the end of massive iron rods that were concealed between floors and yoked opposite walls together.

— Ah, Stigman, Stigman. Fourteen years you resided there. Couldn’t you have simply chronicled the changes that took place in the street? Vicissitudes of vicinity. There’s a high-flown title for you. Fourteen years spent in polyglot Harlem, as against a few years on the homogeneous Lower East Side — which you warped out of shape anyway by the neutron mass of your later experience. Ah! Documented that motley squalor, that poverty: stoop and hallway and roof, street and cellar and backyard; and the sort that lived there, and when. Ah, what more did you need? There was a mine there for the literary man: see the Irish kids in their confirmation suits, white ribbon on their arm — wasn’t that what the little gamins wore? See Veronica Delaney in the pride of princess-loveliness with her mincing gait and black beauty spot on her chin. And the box-ball games, and the rubber baseball games, and kids climbing down the sewer for the lost ball, or up, all the way up one of the cross-braced pillars, and over into the New York Central trestle, the overpass, daring the exposed third rail for the sake of a ten-cent rubber ball.

— And the mock-Homeric street-gang fights and the brawls, and the thousand, thousand sorrows and predicaments and situations. Mr. Maloney, man of 250 pounds or more, plodding heavily up the stairs. He was foreman of a street repair crew, and when the tenants downstairs raised too much of a row, he tapped the floor with a sledgehammer. And the poor Jew-girl — Cuckoo-Lulu, the Irish kids called her, lived on the ground floor back, flaunted a bedraggled rusty fox-fur on her neck in mid-July. Easy lay, easy flighty lay, even for you to muster up predatory courage to take advantage of, and you would; except that her father was already far gone with melanoma, his face a gruesome misshapen cinder block or lava boulder. And you would. Despite that. Except that Mom perceived your intentions — and for the first time, her face suffused, lectured you on the dreadful uncleanliness of women, and the dreadful diseases they could transmit to the unsuspecting male.

— Poor Mom, taking all the blame, as women had done since Eve. And you still would, despite that, entice — Cuckoo-Lulu. But her family suddenly moved away. So instead, you studied ways to augment your guile, improve deception beyond Mom’s detection.

“O Lulu had a baby.

She named him Sunny Jim.

She put him in a pisspot

To loin him how to swim.

He sank to the bottom

He floated to the top.

Lulu got excited

And grabbed him by the—

O what a lulu!

Lulu’s dead and gone.”

— What a delicacy, that song by half-grown micks. . Oh, where were you, Stigman? On every flight of scuffed-linoleum, brass-edged steps of the stairs you climbed were stories (pun), were tales (pun again), hundreds of them. There was even a local newspaper, a house sheet run by an elderly Irishman — the Harlem Home News —into which to delve for “copy,” if you had an iota of initiative, were willing to do an iota of research to exploit: whole volumes of prose awaited the turn of your hand.

No use, Ecclesias. You know full well where I was.

— Alas, yes.

It was a period then when of necessity Ira sought the company of the Jewish youth his age whose families had moved into the area, and those who still lived in the same block, like Davey Baer. Davey had graduated with Ira from P.S. 24 and gone to work as an office boy and wore a fashionable tight, white, removable stiff collar that pleated his scrawny neck into accordion folds. And Davey’s younger brother, Maxie, now also earning wages, looking much like his older brother, swarthy and slight — and one of the group. They, and other Jewish youth, more recent arrivals on the block, or in the immediate neighborhood, became, as it were by default, Ira’s provisional companions during that barren, that grievous period. Izzy (who became Irving) Winchel, with blanched blue eyes, a hooked nose, had aspirations of becoming a baseball pitcher. Utterly unscrupulous, the nearest thing to a pathological liar, and phony as a three-dollar bill; his arrant cribbings and copyings still hadn’t saved him from flunking out of Stuyvesant. He did peculiar things with words: mayonnaise became maysonay, trigonometry trigonomogy. Maxie Dain, short of stature, quick, alert, well-informed, best-spoken of any in the group (perhaps because his family had moved here from Ohio), ambitious, an office boy in an advertising firm, and Ira was sure a capable one. Maxie Dain’s father, blocky and affable, owned the new candy store, whose rear was depot for card games. Jakey Shapiro, short of stature and motherless; his short and cinnamon-mustached widowed father had moved here from Boston, married svelte Mrs. Glott, gold-toothed widow, mother of three married daughters, and janitress of 112 East 119th.

It was in her abode, in the janitorial quarters assigned her on the ground floor rear, that seemingly inoffensive Mrs. Shapiro set up a clandestine alcohol dispensary — not a speakeasy, but a bootleg joint, where the Irish and other shikkers of the vicinity could come and have their pint bottles filled up, at a price. And several times on weekends, when Ira was there, for he got along best with Jake, felt closest to him, because Jake was artistic, some beefy Irishman would come in, hand over his empty pint bottle for refilling, and after greenbacks were passed, and the transaction completed, receive as a goodwill offering a pony of spirits on the house.

And once again those wry (rye? Out vile pun!), wry memories of lost opportunities: Jake’s drab kitchen where the two sat talking about art, about Jake’s favorite painters, interrupted by a knock on the door, opened by Mr. Shapiro, and the customer entered. With the fewest possible words, perhaps no more than salutations, purpose understood, negotiations carried out like a mime show, or a ballet: ecstatic pas de deux with Mr. McNally and Mr. Shapiro — until suspended by Mr. Shapiro’s disappearance with an empty bottle, leaving Mr. McNally to solo in anticipation of a “Druidy drunk,” terminated by Mr. Shapiro’s reappearance with a full pint of booze. Another pas de deux of payment? Got it whole hog — Mr. Shapiro was arrested for bootlegging several times, paid several fines, but somehow, by bribery and cunning, managed to survive in the enterprise, until he had amassed enough wealth to buy a fine place in Bensonhurst by the time “Prohibition” was repealed. A Yiddisher kupf , no doubt.