An American Type: A Novel by Henry Roth

Author:Henry Roth [Roth, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

They celebrated Foster’s first birthday that night. Margie, from across the bathroom passageway, was invited to participate. The strains of her Victrola record’s “Hamhocks and butter beans; that’s what I like about the South” mingled with their “Happy Birthday, dear Foster!” Bea lit the tiny candle on the gaudy little birthday cake. “Candles is superstition,” Bill orated. “When a candle is lit, the ghost walks.”

“They ain’t,” Bea countered. “You light ’em, and the kids makes a wish.”

Margie left. More of Bill’s yarning during supper and afterward. Then a sudden manic gust that swept him with fits of mirth. He told about the prostitute in Cincinnati who was heard lamenting when the fireman threw her smoldering bed and mattress out the window, “There goes my old workbench.” And the banker viewing the hole cut out of the plate-glass bank front by the robbers to gain entrance to his bank: “I never liked that damned glass anyway.” In gruffest guttural Bill played the big Indian chief for Dian. Bea warned him he’d scare the child out of her wits; she was already terrified of the dark.

The evening, Ira’s last one there, wore on with a graphic description of Bill’s own and his father’s tapeworm (his father could feel the head of the revolting creature rear up in his throat). And once again, like a spasm, the mental tic that never left him: reversion to the gun. His cold, blue eyes boring into Ira’s, Bill sat there, the fingers of his sound hand curled on the table beside his steel hook, curling around the butt of a Colt .45. And so vivid the pantomime, it almost restored to the leather-sleeved stump its lost, lopped-off hand holding the other Colt .45 he once owned. Try to fix all this in mind against future erosion, Ira thought: the two kids sleeping in the bedroom, their plump, young, harassed mother, the dull shabbiness of surroundings, the bare, unpainted wood of the cabin walls, the scarred floors dragged over by worn furniture, the grim, indomitable face of the man sitting with forearms resting on the bare table as if he were gripping the butts of two guns.

After supper, they repaired to Margie’s cabin so Ira could bid her farewell. Her cabin was similar in construction to the Loems’, only smaller: walls of brown wooden boards, the studding exposed. Instead of portraits of Marx, Stalin, and William Z. Foster on the dreary walls, Margie had hand-painted plaster English setters pointing at hand-painted plaster pheasants on small gilded shelves. She put on her latest record, a plaintive song:

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