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

One gem stood out in the lusterless setting of his friends’ pastimes: a phonograph record. It had come with the Victrola Izzy’s parents bought: on one side were “Humoresque” and “Angels’ Serenade,” on the other the “Prize Song” from Der Meistersinger , the latter transcribed for violin, and both sides performed by Mischa Elman. The music on one side Ira found transparent, easy to follow and easy to appreciate. The other perplexed him; it seemed disagreeably impenetrable. Over and over again, while the others played pinochle or open poker on Izzy’s kitchen table, Davey Baer whacking a card down with a crack of knuckle on wood, a knack he had learned literally on his ne’er-do-well father’s knee, Ira, with a tenacity born of sheer anomie, played and replayed the “Prize Song”. . until suddenly he understood it! Finally cacophony became deliberately ordered sounds, not just ordinary harmony, but unique sounds and cadences that once comprehended became inevitable, that made a unison of its own. So that’s what they meant when he read about Wagner, when they wrote that Wagner was not only a great composer but an innovator. So that’s what they meant by great music. After a while the music went through your head. It was a different kind of tune, altogether different at first, but it slowly became familiar, and when it became familiar, it sang — in its own way, and yet it was right.

To be entirely faithful to the narrative, this modern aside, written probably in late ’79, ought to be deleted, Ira thought. But it gave an intimate, even touching picture of his life with M, when they were still living in Paradise Acres, a mobile home court in the North Valley of Albuquerque. He had written the fragment soon after he had had his first “total hip replacement”—when the full brunt of rheumatoid arthritis staggered his entire system:

“Loath to write, loath to continue. . After M unfastened the depleted hummingbird feeder, and concocted a fresh batch of scarlet-tinted sugar water, and filled the vessel, she went back to the piano. I found pretext for procrastination (while she was practicing in the living room) in hobbling out to the small hanger under the metal awning above my study window, and suspending the feeder therefrom.

“‘When are you going to get me a grand piano?’ M teased when I reentered the house.

“‘You get anything your heart desires. Where will you put it?’

“‘In your study.’ Her own studio, of about fourteen by fifteen feet floor space, what with Naugahyde couch, armchairs, record player, and coffee table, not to mention the small Steinway piano, had about run out of free area. ‘A grand piano would allow my mended hip so much more freedom.’

“‘Well, why not?’ I agreed, and went back to my room. Once in it and seated before the typewriter I found myself sorting out implications. I looked about my study: a grand piano in here would mean that my cot against the wall would have to go. And this old, scarred desk that I write on, against which the filing cabinet abuts — those would have to go as well. And a small bookcase or two. And the captain’s chair I sit on. Now the room could accommodate a modest-sized grand piano. And of course, I too would be gone. The inference seesawed within volition: the longing to depart, the regret at leaving M.

“Well. . above my study window hangs the ruby-red feeder. And already the first hummingbirds hover devotionally about it, their wings vibrating with a speed that makes them diaphanous. Imbibe, I urge, you feisty-looking clothespins on a toothpick. Go ahead, imbibe. Drink to my prospective memory. And to memoriam harum rerum .”

II

Soon after he was admitted to DeWitt Clinton that fall, Ira reapplied for work at Park & Tilford, was rehired, and was assigned to a store on Broadway and 103rd Street. It was within easy subway distance from the high school, also on the West Side. Yet Ira worked there for only a couple of months. The place, the people, were altogether different, and so were his duties. Gone were the free and the old-fashioned, traditional ways of doing things — even though they had taken him so long to learn. No trucks set out from the store to upper reaches of Manhattan and the Bronx. Whether there were any deliveries by truck anymore, Ira never found out. Perhaps all that was centralized in the very large P&T downtown, as his former mentor, Mr. Klein, had once remarked. But there was no Mr. Klein for shipping clerk; in fact, there was no shipping clerk. Instead there was a cellarman, who had charge of everything down in the cellar, which effectively interdicted nibbling, sampling, noshing , snitching. He was a hulking, prematurely gray-haired bully, a brute if there ever was one. Yeager by name. It was the first time in his life Ira had ever come in contact with anyone who seemed to relish cruel petty tyranny, callous domineering for its own sake, far worse than Ira’s father. Whenever afterward he heard the word “bully,” it was Yeager who personified it, Yeager who came to mind. Clearly of German origin, and yet anti-Jewishness seemed to play very little part in his hectoring and bluster, at least very little that was overt or specific, for the other after-school delivery boy, a gentile, younger than Ira, and with a shriveled arm, came in for the same kind of brutal hazing that Ira did. His first day on the job, assigned the task of transferring canned goods from carton to shelf, feeling at home, at ease, doing the things he had learned so well to do, he began whistling.

“Cut out that whistlin’!” came Yeager’s threatening bawl. “There ain’t no dogs down here.”

Ah, the vain retorts sixty-five years too late, to launch at one undoubtedly long since dust: “But I thought there was a dog here,” he might have snapped.

And all the consequences that would flow therefrom, all the consequences that could be envisaged. “What d’ye mean by that?”

“You know what I mean.”

“What’re you, a wise guy?”

“Just as wise as you are.”

“Hey, you wanna get the shit kicked outta you?”

“Try it.”

Oh, the violent reprisals. And the lawsuits. Or the even more vicious countermeasures, such as Bill Loem of a later volume would have taken at that age (and did). The quart bottle, held in both hands, and brought down treacherously, rashly, and with utmost force on the back of Yeager’s head — and the job finished by slashing the throat of the prostrate figure with the jagged shards of the same bottle. It was the kind of deed Bill Loem would have committed.

Alas, Ira reflected, he himself was a murderer by nature: he never forgave. . And even thinking not only about the incident now, but his reaction to it, threw light on the attraction Bill held for him, and Bill’s hold on him: that he dared to do, and did, what Ira, and how many million others, only daydreamed of doing.

Ira saw the big brute a few days later waylay one of the pretty girl clerks seeking an item in the cellar aisles, seize her, and force her over backward while he planted kisses on her. Her pleading—“Please, Mr. Yeager! Let go! Mr. Yeager!”—went unheeded — as if Yeager were indeed the frightening plaster golem he looked like, his long body encased in his white work apron. Ira gaped, cringing in revulsion at the golem ’s rut — like that in the movie. Sneak over to the manager of the store, was all Ira had to do, squeal on the sonofabitch — if he had the nerve. He didn’t.

The end of the job came when Ira’s schoolboy workmate attempted to tuck a more than usually heavy box of groceries under his arm. To Ira, the episode would shine in retrospect as the only one in his whole boyhood informed with a redeeming element, a genuine show of courage. The box slipped from under the youngster’s shriveled arm, and the boy was powerless to prevent the box’s downward slide with his withered limb. Contents spilled out — before he managed by dint of knee and good arm to keep his entire burden from tumbling to the cellar floor.