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

“Everybody steals there — I mean the conductors,” Ira explained virtuously. “I’m afraid. I turn in more money than they do.”

“ Noo? ”

“They don’t like it. One of ’em told me, a lousy antee-semitt bastard, you keep makin’ us look bad, you better look out.”

“ Azoy? ” said Mom. “ Zol er gehargert vern .”

“Ah, what they talk about,” Pop scoffed. “You mind your own affairs, nothing will happen. I know these loudmouths.”

“For three weeks more pay that he brings home, I can dispense with the risk he runs. If they begin to talk that way, they’ll bother him even more. I can do without.”

“Izzy Winchel said he can get me a job at the Polo Grounds.”

“Meaning what?”

“Polo Grounds, that’s where they play baseball.”

“Baseball. And what has that to do with you?” Mom asked.

“You sell soda water there,” Ira answered testily. “It comes in bottles — don’tcha know? All kinds of flavors.”

“Aha, you’ll be a peddler.”

“It’s not a peddler! It’s called a hustler.”

“Then let it be hustler,” said Mom. “ Abi gesint . Without beatings, God avert, and without stealing.”

“Then let it be that way. But get back my hundred dollars,” Pop decreed. “Don’t fail to get it at once.”

“No. As soon as my day off.”

It was Thursday. He put in an early appearance at the checker’s window. “What’re you doin’ here today?” The younger and the more easygoing of the two checkers, Lenahan, dark-haired and noncommittal, blew a tight cone of cigarette smoke. The two “backup” conductors in the office in case of emergency listened idly.

“I’m quitting. I came in to get my hundred dollars.”

“Your what?”

“My hundred-dollar security. It’s my father’s.”

“What’re you quittin’ for? You’re doin’ all right. We like your work.” It was the older checker, the thin guy, Hallcain, who shaded his watchful eyes with a green visor.

The question found Ira unprepared. Why hadn’t he anticipated it? “I—” Should he mention hustling? The ballpark? They might try to persuade him not to quit.

Behind Mr. Hallcain, Mr. Hulcomb at his desk took note of the proceedings. Together, Ira felt their disapproval, disapproval verging on hostility, bear down on him like a menace. “I’m going to go back to high school,” he said, clutching at another excuse.

Mr. Hulcomb arose from his desk, came over to the counter, and took charge. “What’d you say?”

“I’m going back to high school.”

“That’s a hell of a time to tell us now!” Mr. Hulcomb seemed to stamp his heavy black eyebrows down on his glistening scowl. “Why didn’t you tell us that when you came for a job? We’d never have hired you. That wasn’t what you told us, was it?”

“No. I didn’t know I was goin’ to go back. My mother wants me to. I didn’t wanna.”

Mr. Hulcomb paid no attention to Ira’s alibi. His lips swelled with repressed wrath. “You hire Jews, that’s what you get. No notice or anything. They’ll quit on you cold, every time.”

“I can’t help it.” Ira lowered his head sullenly, stubborn and cowed into sullenness, and in his desperation only hoping that Mr. Hulcomb wouldn’t see through his flimsy alibi and remind Ira that the opening of school was still three weeks off. “I got my receipt. You said I could get the money back as soon as I quit. That’s why my father lent it to me.” He didn’t have to look around at the two backup conductors on the bench behind him to feel their absorption, their fixity of attention.

Neither did Mr. Hulcomb. As if by implicit consent, almost as if consternation were like a tiny unseen whirlwind that brought them together, he and the two clerks held a short, tense, muted council, reached a decision quickly. Mr. Hulcomb went back to his desk.

“All right, Stigman. We haven’t been to the bank this morning yet. Come back this afternoon — about four o’clock,” Hallcain instructed, with reassuring adjustment of his green visor. “We’ll have your security money.”

Even Ira could figure that out, or thought he could. By four in the afternoon, the whole first shift would have turned over its day’s receipts. Then the company would have enough to pay him his hundred dollars. But he didn’t want to conjecture; he didn’t want to speculate. He was worried enough as it was. All he wanted was Pop’s hundred dollars back.

He waited until almost five to give the office a chance to collect the money. When he entered the stinky waiting room, only Hallcain was there, behind the counter, strands of thin blondish hair across the top of his head, separated by visor edge. Would he say, “Come back tomorrow”? That would be the unmistakable signal for Ira’s moaning retreat home, his whining to Pop about another fiasco. And then all kinds of wrath, all kinds of invective, all kinds of trouble. .

Approaching the counter, Ira displayed his receipt, laid his badge down beside it. To his pent, soaring joy, he watched Hallcain count out a hundred dollars in tens and fives, and with an air both severe and peremptory, push the little stack of bills toward Ira. Fives and tens, they were receipts! What the hell was the difference, as long as they added up to a hundred. Ira picked up the bank notes, uttered a fervent thanks. For once he could march into the kitchen proudly and say, “Okay, Pop, here’s your money.” And for once he did.

Mom blessed him: “ Zolst gebentsht vern .”

And Pop, as he counted over the bills: “Indeed a novelty. Something went well for a change. That such a thing has come to pass requires invoking a shekheyooni . Indeed. That we have survived to witness this day.”

“And beside his clothes for the coming year, he bought a fuzball he longed for — for months.” Mom rocked for emphasis. “And a swimming suit with a white woollen shirt top. Noo .”

“And added a flourishing increment toward your Persian lamb coat,” Pop baited in fine fettle — as he arranged the currency by denomination in his black billfold. “And what interest do I gain? Ten weeks, nearly ten weeks of twenty dollars in your till. I should gain a small rebate on the weekly allowance you mulct from me.”

“Gain proper burial,” Mom rejoined, ruffled at once.

V

Almost immediately after Ira quit his job as bus conductor, the very next weekend, he was inducted by Izzy Winchel into the Polo Grounds. He met him on 119th Street, about 9:00 A.M., and they proceeded at a fairly rapid pace to the Third Avenue El on 116th Street. There they took the uptown train, and once across the Harlem River, by some changing of trains on the other side, their new route led to the Polo Grounds. There must have been some junction with the west side of the El in those days that enabled them to travel from Third Avenue to the west Bronx, to Coogan’s Bluff, as the sportswriters called it. They climbed down from the El platform to an El-shaded sidewalk that seemed even gloomier than usual because of the high, dark wall that reared up from it, and through which opened the main entrance to the ballpark. . gloomy and forbidding in the morning, though later in the day, when the ticket booths were opened, and the sun was higher, and the fans queued up, compact and restive, poised to dash for the best seats in the grandstands, most of that initial dourness was dissipated. Posted at the dark entrance, when Izzy and he arrived — to join a small flock of other hopefuls, other candidate hustlers, slouched, reading tabloids, or shifting about — was a single uniformed guard, an elderly man, large of frame, his hair gray, his face weathered and expressionless, and yet with the peculiar gravity of a man biding his time, patiently enduring it.