He ought to have been happy — Edith had tucked him inside her, and had laughed when he got a hard-on, and said, “Wait for me, lover.” Lover, he! Larry was the one the word fitted. He had been damn harsh with Larry, cruel, the way he cut his friend off. Cut him off from sharing in his life. But what the hell was he going to do? He didn’t know how to be politic, or civil, never did. He hadn’t been raised that way. He and his superstitions: that was another gift from Pop. Put your underwear on backward or inside out, uhuh! That was bad luck. If you’ve forgotten something, and come back into the house to get it — uhuh! You might as well not go, give up your mission, you’re going in vain. Praise something, admire something too warmly, uhuh! A gitoik, you’ve blighted it with the Evil Eye. How do you pry that out of yourself? O saisons, O châteaux—was that Iz’s quote from Rimbaud? — Quelle âme est sans défauts?
Oh, Park Avenue under the steel viaduct of the Grand Central, oh, shabby tenements, what’ve you got to say? Or what was he trying to tell himself? Himself — he had to laugh — he wasn’t a self; he was a manifold, he was a clump of chumps, he was like a swarm of interacting creatures about to leave the old. . the old warren. That was it. He was about to leave home, break with his surroundings, break away from Mom. How many times did he have to say that: apprehensive because of it. No matter if the new was better than the old, no matter if he was to live with Edith, part of the time, for a while, and permanently afterward. He had figured it out: change, change, that made one forbode. Okay. Okay. “Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.” Okay, okay — he heard a Grand Central train approaching overhead, a muted rumble, saluting his a-home-again stumble. “Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown.” Okay. Okay. “O fare thee well”—that was a good one from Hausman—“for ill fare I.” No, that would fit Larry, not him. But after all, what had he said to the guy? Nothing so bad, only the way he said it.
You turned the corner around Jake’s six-story pile, ugly six-story pile of Jake’s house, bricks brown as coffee grounds. Fitting landlord Jake was too, like a steer, poor fat Mamie’s counterpart, though she was no longer landlady. After Jake’s house came the three-story dwelling next, where the Italian barber once had his shop and his spiral red-white pole in front, and Leo D and his widowed mother had once lived on the first floor — oh, boy, that pasta, after they moved — his reward — and the awful bellyache, wow! And the terrible hike to Edith’s in bed with Lewlyn, her olive-skinned body naked under dark bathrobe coming to the door laughing guiltily felicitous. . from opening the calipers of her thighs around Lewlyn, now closing them around his. Wasn’t that strange? And what made the difference? Time. Time and change. You couldn’t compress it alclass="underline" Larry get off, Lewlyn get on, Lewlyn get off, Ira mount her, Ira get in. Gang fuck stretched over months and years. . Jesus, the things that came to mind: gang fuck, whorehouse, geologic eons: what would the past year be, compared to the billions of Precambrian years he was walking on? The metamorphic mica schist, the gneiss. Not even yesterday. Not even five minutes ago. Human time and change. Who would know as he knew that beside Jake’s brown fortress had once been the escape doors of a movie house on Park Avenue, a movie house that failed: metal-sheathed escape exits where in the summer you put your head against the other kid’s ass to make a train of horses, while the opposing side jumped up on your back, yelling as they landed, “Johnny on the pony, one, two, three!” and tried to break down the train. What crude games these micks brought over from Ireland. Or their grandfathers did. . 108 East 119th Street.
IV
Mrs. Shapiro was in the kitchen with Mom when Ira entered, dumpy, shapeless Mrs. Shapiro. She lived “in the back” on the same floor, in the five tsevorfeneh rooms, because she didn’t object to looking out at backyards and wash poles the way Mom did, and she had been living in the house almost as long as the Stigman family. Despite her illiteracy, Mrs. Shapiro managed to keep abreast of the latest news, usually of Jewish interest, thanks to Mom, who read the paper to her neighbor almost every day, when both had a little free time. And of course she read her as well the latest installment of the roman, the serial that appeared daily in Der Tag. Mrs. Shapiro was in better circumstances now than when Ira was a kid. She had taken in boarders then, and one of them Ira still remembered: a tall, lanky guy, a men’s garment presser by trade, a Mr. Zolichef, who openly offered Mom, in Mrs. Shapiro’s kitchen — and in Ira’s presence — five dollars for letting him gratify his sexual cravings on her person. How the hell it was said in Yiddish, Ira no longer remembered, but intercourse with her was the gist of it — and so crude, the two women burst into laughter. And of course, Ira would remember exactly that. Mrs. Shapiro no longer took in boarders, no longer had to, because her three children, Meyer and Joe and Sophie, were all working and contributing to the household. Meyer was a bookkeeper, and Joe worked in Biolov’s drugstore — still worked in Biolov’s drugstore, where he had taken the job after Ira quit in resentment at being docked for the five dollars he lost, or that was stolen from him. Sophie was a file clerk. Long ago, Ira, as he did with every little girl he had a chance to, tried to induce her to “play bad” with him, without success.
So life was easier for Mrs. Shapiro now, for which Mom was very happy, goodhearted Mom, because before the children began to earn and contribute to the household — and had become old enough to insist that their mother get some of their earnings — her husband, Abe, squat, bald, pompous ladies’ garment worker, had allowed her a pittance, even less than Mom’s, on which to run the household. And Mrs. Shapiro, in order to make both ends meet, as soon as the children were off to school, left the house to work as a domestic — of the most menial kind, scouring floors, cleaning windows and woodwork, boiling and scrubbing clothes on corrugated washboards. Mom had previously thought — and so she had informed the rest of the family — that Mrs. Shapiro was a shnorrerkeh, a moocher, a spurious mendicant, who frequented Jewish philanthropic and charitable institutions for which she could beg or solicit, because Mrs. Shapiro frequently returned home with all manner of bundles and packages in her black oilcloth shopping bag, sometimes clothing, obviously castoffs according to Mom, or household articles, or half loaves of bread, staples, matzahs when in season, leftover kugel, leftovers in jars. Quiet and meek, the poor woman seemed to accept the unspeakable stinginess of her husband, his contemptuous — and contemptible — treatment of her as her fate: she had brought no whit of dowry to her marriage, came of a large family of a bali gooleh, a stage driver, was homely and illiterate. No wonder the bastard, her husband, lorded it over her, lorded it over her unconscionably. It was only by accident — from the caterer of a wedding Mom attended — that she learned that Mrs. Shapiro did domestic work for the caterer’s wife, and the things she brought home were discards and leftovers, meted out to her by her employer. She worked. She was not the illegitimate recipient of Jewish charity. She toiled to eke out the miserable pittance her husband thought fit to dole out for her household needs. Compared to Abe, Pop was a model of munificence. So there were worse than Pop, Ira reflected: worse in that respect, like Mr. Shapiro, the skinflint, miserly Yid. But how was he toward his kids — and they toward him? They were fond of him, and he of them. Ah, there was the difference. Figure that out.