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

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Yeager barked. “What’re you, a cripple?”

“He is a cripple!” Ira blurted out. “He couldn’t help it!”

Contrite and silent, the youngster picked up the fallen canned goods.

“Gimme dem,” Yeager ordered gruffly. “Dey got dents in ’em.” And to Ira: “You takin’ care of him? Or what?”

“No.”

“Den stay out of it.”

Still, Ira could tell that Yeager was taken aback, if only by his altered tone of voice and the way he stalked off. Ira was startled at himself. And when he calmed down and helped his skinny, crippled workmate repack his box and tuck it safely under his arm — without permission from Yeager — Ira felt more than startled: scared. Scared that he had involuntarily been, been for only a moment, what he would have to be from now on, if Yeager was to be what he had shown himself to be just now. He would have to stand his ground, Ira sensed, and he couldn’t: the very thought scared him. He had caught a glimpse of Yeager’s vulnerability, and Yeager knew it: his bullying was nothing but a sham, a false front. Now Ira was vulnerable. He’d have to cringe and toady to stay on good terms with someone he knew was a fake. And he couldn’t. Then what? He’d have to quit.

Saturday evening, after he received his pay envelope, Ira left the store, never to return.

III

Ira could feel changes taking place within him. In February of 1922 he was sixteen. By then, Einstein had become a celebrity, a household word, and a comfort to Jews everywhere. It was said that only twelve people in the entire world could follow his abstruse theories of the universe. A Yiddisher kupf , Jews bragged. Sir Oliver Lodge, world-famous physicist and spiritualist, may have been miffed at the unceremonious discard of his theory about the role of a universal ether. But Mom gloried in admiration of the supreme Jewish intellect: “ Aza kupf! ” she exclaimed in sheer transport. In its own rollicking, inimitable fashion, the Police Glee Club also paid tribute to the great physicist. When they were invited to entertain the students of DeWitt Clinton during their regular assembly on Friday, the cops vocalized with zest:

“How high is up?

How low is down?

How fast is slow?

And when do we get the dough?

When it’s nighttime in Sicily,

You can’t get a drink in Massachusetts.

How high is up?

How low is down?. .”

Dr. Paul, the school’s principal, sharing the platform with the singers, could hardly have been amused. His stiff posture, his grave face, made all the more dread by a slight stroke that paralyzed his cheek, all indicated he scarcely thought the ditty edifying. But of course the assembled students cheered and clapped in lusty approval.

Oh, there were spiral nebulae in the cosmos, island universes strewn light-years away; whole universes, not mere solar systems, remote Milky Ways. Oh, so much to free one from oneself, or almost, to set one dreaming, entranced by vastness, freed by insignificance, if only, oh, if only he weren’t trapped. Why was he trapped? Why did he have to be trapped? Far worse would happen to him than what happened when he lost his briefcase, worse than happened to him over the silver-filigreed fountain pen, if he were caught! Oh, the unspeakable, the abominable act, the limitless punishment it would merit. And yet, what ruse, what provocative coaxing, what consummate opportunism, shifty suborning, did he resort to, stoop to, until the blistery green kitchen walls lilted with consent. Incorrigible, unscrupulous, sardonic, treacherous, turning to advantage solace and tears, comfort and sympathy to ploys for undermining defenses. What use was his never-ending, ever-reiterated, never again? Like steel against flint, remorse struck sparks out of fear to rekindle desire, desire that inflamed.

Oh, yes, the world was changing: a mélange. There was the Teapot Dome scandal, about oil and Mr. Doheny, yes? And Disarmament Conferences, no? And the “Yellow Peril,” that the jingo, scare-headline-patriotic Journal American warned about, the Hearst newspaper Ira never read, except when Pop brought it home from the restaurant. Oh, there was Henry Ford and his Dearborn Express , blaming the Jews for being insidious, grasping, in league against America, spreading Bolshevism, atheism, seeking to infect a wholesome America with their godless virus. . Everyone was sure Lenin and Trotsky would soon be overthrown — in another year at most. There were Palmer Raids, chain gangs, vigilantes, Ku Klux Klan in white robes and hoods, and lynch mobs who “strung up” Negroes. And there was William Farnum, the movie actor with the mobile eyebrows, and the lightning draw, and unerring aim, and the effortlessly acrobatic Douglas Fairbanks and melting Mary Pickford and Bull Montana — and wonderful, wonderful Charlie Chaplin.

And there was Normalcy and the High Cost of Living, and Prosperity, of course. Pop worked. Mom hoarded for a Persian lamb coat. Ira’s uncles Max and Harry, who had failed to finish school, abandoned their original trades, glove-making and fur-matching, and joined Morris and Sam in the restaurant business: they opened a cafeteria in Jamaica, in Queens, and prospered beyond their fondest hopes.

And for Ira, a new experience, a wholly novel and at last marvelous scholastic experience, far beyond mere gratification, the preening of excelling, or even getting high grades. Ennobling, he would have said, except people would have laughed at him; and yet that was how he felt, raised in his own esteem, elated, vouchsafed at least in one region of mental wholeness. For the first time in his life, he felt he not only comprehended a subject fully, in all its aspects, but comprehended the foundations on which the subject rested. The subject was plane geometry. It became a saving unity for him, a kind of beatitude in his aimless, deeply troubled, dejected, self-distrustful life. Plane geometry endlessly minted new truths out of old, miraculously reared a breathtaking edifice of proofs rooted in a few axioms. It was like annealing dull truisms into lucid truths.

At first, at the very beginning of the spring term, Ira was in a panic: why did you have to prove something so intractably obvious already? How could you demonstrate the manifest? Opposite angles were equal! They just were. By what method, what procedure, did you go about showing the patent was the true? You would have to rummage among, beg assistance from that lowly handful of postulates that he had scarcely deigned to notice at the outset because they were so self-evident. That was how you did it: supplements of equal angles were equal. . oh, that was it! He soon doted on the subject — often to the neglect of other subjects. A’s in blackboard recitations, A’s in quizzes, became routine.

And now, my friend, and now, my friend — Ira clamped the palms of his hands between knees — that time approaches, the crisis.

— That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang. .

Yes. But not yet.

— Or let this cup pass from me.

Yes. But it was later, Ecclesias. It was in the fall, not the spring. It was in the second half of Euclid looks on beauty bare-ass and all that, not the first half. You know something, Ecclesias, I can show that Jesus himself proved that God didn’t exist.

— Pray, don’t bother.

It’s a fact, though. He said: If it be possible, let this cup pass from me. It didn’t pass from him. So it wasn’t possible. A valid inference, Ecclesias? If it wasn’t possible, then how can God exist, to whom all things are possible? Neat, no?

— No. You’re forgetting something. Jesus added a proviso to the effect: nevertheless as Thou willest, not I.