When I went to bed the music was still playing. And when each of the scratchy shellac records reached its end, allowing me in the interval before the next to hear Sophie’s inconsolable weeping, I tossed and turned and wondered again how one mortal human being could be the vessel to contain such grief. It seemed nearly impossible that Nathan could inspire this raw, devastating woe. But clearly he had done so, and this posed for me a problem. For if, as I have said, I felt myself slipping already into that sick and unfortified situation known as love, wasn’t it foolish of me to expect to win the affection, much less to share the bed, of one so dislodgeably attached to the memory of her lover? There was something actually indecent about the idea, like laying siege to a recently bereaved widow. To be sure, Nathan was out of the way, but wasn’t it vain of me to expect to fill the vacuum? For one thing, I remembered I had so little money. Even if I broke through the barrier of her grief, how could I expect to woo this ex-starveling with her taste for fancy restaurants and expensive phonograph records?
Finally the music stopped and she stopped weeping too, while the restless creak of springs told me she had gone to bed. I lay there for a long time awake, listening to the soft night-sounds of Brooklyn—a far-off howling dog, a passing car, a burst of gentle laughter from a woman and a man at the edge of the park. I thought of Virginia, of home. I drifted off to sleep, but slept uneasily, indeed chaotically, once waking in the unfamiliar darkness to find myself very close to some droll phallic penetration—through folds, or a hem, or a damp wrinkle—of my displaced pillow. Then again I fell asleep, only to wake with a start just before dawn, in the dead silence of the hour, with pounding heart and an icy chill staring straight up at my ceiling above which Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer’s fierce clarity that she was doomed.
Chapter Three
“STINGO! OH, STINGO!” Late that same morning—a sunny June Sunday—I heard their voices on the other side of the door, rousing me from sleep. Nathan’s voice, then Sophie’s: “Stingo, wake up. Wake up, Stingo!” The door itself, while not locked, was secured by a night chain, and from where I lay against the pillow I could see Nathan’s beaming face as he peered at me through the wide crack in the door. “Rise and shine,” said the voice. “Hit the deck, kid. Up and at ’em, boy. We’re going to Coney Island!” And behind him I heard Sophie, in clear piping echo of Nathan: “Rise and shine! Up and at ’em!” Her command was followed by a silvery little giggle, and now Nathan began to rattle the door and the chain. “Come on, Cracker, hit the deck! You can’t lie there all day snoozin’ like some ole hound dog down South.” His voice took on the syrupy synthetic tones of deepest Dixieland—an accent, though, to my sleep-drugged but responsive ears, that was the product of remarkably deft mimicry. “Stir them lazy bones, honeychile,” he drawled in the munchiest cornpone. “Put on yo’ bathin’ costume. We gonna hab old Pompey hitch up the old coach-an’-foah and hab us a little picnic outin’ down by the seashoah!”
I was—to put it in restrained terms—somewhat less than exhilarated by all this. His snarling insult of the night before, and his general mistreatment of Sophie, had trespassed on my dreams all night in various allusive masks and guises, and now to awake to behold the same midcentury urban face intoning these hokey ante-bellum lyrics was simply more than I could tolerate. I leaped straight out of the bedclothes and hurled myself at the door. “Get out of here!” I yelled. “Leave me alone!”
I tried to slam the door in Nathan’s face, but he had one foot firmly entrenched in the crack. “Get out!” I shouted again. “You have your goddamned nerve, doing this. Get your goddamned foot out of that door and leave me the fuck alone!”
“Stingo, Stingo,” the voice went on in lulling cadences, having reverted to the Brooklyn style. “Stingo, take it easy. No offense meant, kid. Come on, open up. Let’s have a coffee together and make up and be pals.”
“I don’t want to be pals with you!” I howled at Nathan. I burst into a fit of coughing. Half strangling on the goo and crud of threescore daily Camels, I was surprised that I was coherent at all. As I hacked away, oddly embarrassed at the croupy noise I was making, I began to suffer further slow surprise—and not a little distress—over the fact that the atrocious Nathan had materialized like some wicked genie at Sophie’s side, and seemed once more to be in possession and command. For at least a minute, perhaps longer, I shuddered and heaved in the throes of a pulmonary spasm, having had in the meantime to endure the humiliation of submitting to Nathan in the role of medical savant: “You’ve got a regular smoker’s cough there, Cracker. You also have the haggard, drawn face of a person hooked on nicotine. Look at me for a second, Cracker, look me straight in the eye.”
I glared at him through leisurely narrowing pupils fogged over with rage and loathing. “Don’t call me—” I began, but the words were cut off by another racking cough.
“Haggard, that’s the word,” Nathan went on. “Too bad, for such a nice-looking guy. The haggard look comes from being slowly deprived of oxygen. You should cut out smoking, Cracker. It causes cancer of the lung. Also lousy on the heart.” (In 1947, it may be remembered, the truly pernicious effect of cigarette smoking on the health was barely surmised even by medical men, and word of its potential erosive damage, when uttered at all, was greeted by sophisticates with amused skepticism. It was an old wives’ tale of the same category as that in which it was imputed to masturbation such scourges as acne, or warts, or madness. Therefore, although Nathan’s remark was doubly infuriating at the time, piling, as I thought, imbecility on plain viciousness, I realize now how weirdly prescient it really was, how typical it was of that erratic, daft, tormented, but keenly honed and magisterial intelligence I was to get to know and find myself too often pitted against. (Fifteen years later, while in the toils of a successful battle with my addiction to cigarettes, I would recall Nathan’s admonition—for some reason especially that word haggard—like a voice from the grave.) Now, however, his words were an invitation to manslaughter.
“Don’t call me Cracker!” I cried, recovering my voice. “I’m a Phi Beta Kappa from Duke University. I don’t have to take your rotten insults. Now you get your foot out of that door and leave me alone!” I struggled vainly to dislodge his shoe from the crack. “And I don’t need any cheap advice about cigarettes,” I rasped through the clogged and inflamed flues of my larynx.
Then Nathan underwent a remarkable transformation. His manner suddenly became apologetic, civilized, almost contrite. “All right, Stingo, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Forgive me, will you? I won’t use that word again. Sophie and I just wanted to extend a little friendly welcome on a beautiful summer day.” It was positively breathtaking, this swift change in him, and I might have felt that he was simply indulging in another form of leaden sarcasm had my instincts not told me that he was sincere. In fact, I sensed he was suffering a rather painful overreaction, as people sometimes do when after thoughtlessly teasing a child they realize they have caused real anguish. But I was not to be moved.
“Scram,” I said flatly and firmly. “I want to be alone.”
“I’m sorry, old pal, I really am. I was just kidding a little with that Cracker bit. I really didn’t mean to offend you.”
“No, Nathan really didn’t mean to offend you,” Sophie chimed in. She moved from behind Nathan to a spot where I could see her clearly. And something about her once more tugged away at my heart. Unlike the portrait of misery she had presented the night before, she was now plainly flushed with high spirits and joy at Nathan’s miraculous return. It was possible almost to feel the force of her happiness; it flowed from her body in visible little glints and tremors—in the sparkle of her eyes, and in her animated lips, and in the pink exultant glow that colored her cheeks like rouge. This happiness, together with the look of appeal on that radiant face, was something that even in my disheveled morning state I found altogether seductive—no, irresistible. “Please, Stingo,” she p
leaded, “Nathan didn’t mean to offend you, to hurt your feelings. We just wanted to make friends and take you out on a beautiful summer day. Please. Please come with us!”
Nathan relaxed—I felt his foot move away from the crack—and I relaxed, not without a severe pang, however, at the sight of him as he suddenly grabbed Sophie around the waist and commenced to nuzzle her cheek. With the lazy appetite of a calf mooning over a salt lick, he smeared his sizable nose against her face, which caused her to emit a gay burbling laugh, like the fragment of a carol, and when he flicked at her earlobe with the pink tip of his tongue she gave the most faithful imitation of a cat’s electric purr I had ever seen or heard. It was a dumfounding tableau. Only brief hours before, he was ready to slice her throat.
Sophie pulled the trick. I was helpless in the face of her plea, and mumbled a grudging “Well, okay.” Then just as I was at the point of unfastening the chain and letting them in, I changed my mind. “Screw off,” I said to Nathan, “you owe me an apology.”
“I apologized,” he replied. His voice was deferential. “I said I wouldn’t call you Cracker any more.”
“Not just that,” I retorted. “The bit about lynching and all that crap. About the South. It’s an insult. Suppose I told you that somebody with a name like Landau couldn’t be anything but a fat, hook-nosed, miserly pawnbroker out to cheat trusting Gentiles. It’d make you mad. It works both ways, these slurs. You owe me another apology.” I realized I had become a little pompous, but I was adamant.
“Okay, I’m sorry for that too,” he said expansively, warmly. “I know I was off base there. Let’s forget it, okay? I beg your pardon, honestly. But we’re serious about taking you on a little outing today. Look, why don’t we leave it like this? It’s early yet. Why don’t you take your time and get dressed and then come upstairs to Sophie’s room. We’ll all have a beer or coffee or something. Then we’ll go to Coney Island. We’ll have lunch in a great seafood restaurant I know down there, and then we’ll go to the beach. I’ve got a good friend who makes extra money Sundays working as a lifeguard. He lets us lie on a special restricted part of the beach where there aren’t any people to kick sand in your face. So come on.”
Sulking rather obviously, I said, “I’II think about it.”
“Ah, be a sport, come on!”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll come.” To which I added a tepid “Thanks.”
While I shaved and slicked myself up, I reflected with puzzlement on this odd turn of events. What devious motive, I wondered, caused such a good-will gesture? Could it be that Sophie had urged Nathan toward this cordial move, perhaps to get him to make up for his nastiness of the night before? Or was he simply out to obtain something else? I knew the ways of New York well enough by now to at least give passing credence to the idea that Nathan might just be some sort of con man, out to hustle up something as commonplace and as obvious as money. (This prompted me to check the condition of the slightly more than four hundred dollars I had secreted at the back of the medicine chest, in a box meant for Johnson & Johnson gauze bandages. The loot, in tens and twenties, was intact, causing me as usual to whisper a loving little threnody to my spectral patron Artiste, moldering to dust these many years in Georgia.) But that seemed an unlikely suspicion, after Morris Fink’s observation about Nathan’s singular affluence. Nonetheless, all these possibilities floated about in my head as I prepared with some misgivings to join Sophie and Nathan. I really felt I ought to stay and try to work, try to set some words down on the yawning yellow page, even if they be inane and random jottings. But Sophie and Nathan had quite simply laid siege to my imagination. What I really wondered about was the smoochy detente between the two of them, reestablished short hours after the most harrowing scene of lovers’ strife I could imagine this side of a low-grade Italian opera. Then I considered the fact that they both simply might be crazy, or outcast like Paolo and Francesca, caught up in some weird, shared perdition.
Morris Fink was informative as usual, if not particularly illuminating, when I ran into him in the hallway just as I was leaving my room. While we were exchanging banalities I became for the first time aware of a church bell chiming, far-off but distinct, in the direction of Flatbush Avenue. At once poignant and reminiscent of Southern Sundays, it also unnerved me a little, since I had the firm impression that synagogues did not come equipped with belfries. Very briefly I closed my eyes as the chimes descended on the stillness, thinking of a homely brick church in a Tidewater town, piety and Sabbath hush, the dewy little Christian lambs with flower-stalk legs trouping to the Presbyterian tabernacle with their Hebrew history books and Judaical catechisms. When I opened my eyes Morris was explaining, “No, that’s no synagogue. That’s the Dutch Reformed church up at Church Avenue and Flatbush. They only ring it on Sundays. I go by there sometime when they got a service going. Or Sunday School. They sing their fuckin’ heads off. ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Shit like that. Those Dutch Reformed broads are something. A lot of them look like they need a blood transfusion... Or a hot meat injection.” He gave a lewd snort. “The cemetery’s nice, though. In the summer it’s cool in there. Some of these wild Jewish kids go in there at night and get laid.”
“Well, Brooklyn’s got a little bit of everything, hasn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah. All religions. Jewish, Irish, Italian, Dutch Reformed, boogies, everything. Lots of boogies comin’ in now, since the war. Williamsburg. Brownsville. Bedford-Stuyvesant, that’s where they’re movin’ into. Fuckin’ apes, I call ’em. Boy, do I hate those boogies. Apes! Aaaa-gh!” He gave a shudder, and baring his teeth, made what I took to be a simian grimace. Just as he did so, the regal, celebrant strains of Handel’s Water Music shimmered down the stairs from Sophie’s room. And very faintly from above I heard Nathan’s laughter.
“I guess you got to meet Sophie and Nathan,” Morris said.
I allowed that I had, in a manner of speaking, met them.
“What do you think of that Nathan? Don’t he break your balls?” A sudden light glowed in the lusterless eyes, his voice became conspiratorial. “You know what I think he is? A golem, that’s what. Some kind of a golem.”
“Golem?” I said. “What on earth’s a golem?”
“Well, I can’t explain exactly. It’s a Jewish... what do you call it?—not exactly religious, but some kind of monster. He’s been invented, that’s what, like Frankenstein, see, only he’s been invented by a rabbi. He’s made out of clay or some kind of shit like that, only he looks like a human. Anyway, you can’t control him. I mean, sometimes he acts normal, just like a normal human. But deep down he’s a runaway fuckin’ monster. That’s a golem. That’s what I mean about Nathan. He acts like a fuckin’ golem.”
With a vague stir of recognition, I asked Morris to elaborate on his theory.
“Well, this morning early, see, I guess you were asleep, I see Sophie go into Nathan’s room. My room is right across the hall and I can see everything. It’s about seven-thirty or eight. I heard them fightin’ last night, so I know that Nathan’s gone. Now guess what I see next? This is what I see. Sophie’s cryin’, softly, but still cryin’ her head off. When she goes into Nathan’s room she leaves the door open and lays down. But guess where she lays down? On the bed? No! On the fuckin’ floor! She lays down on the floor in her nightgown, all curled up like a baby. I watch her for a while, maybe ten, fifteen minutes—you know, thinkin’ it’s crazy for her to be in Nathan’s room layin’ on the floor like that—and then all of a sudden down below on the street I hear a car drive up and I look out the window and there’s Nathan. Did you hear him when he came in? He made a hell of a lot of noise, stampin’ and bangin’ and mutterin’ to himself.”
“No, I was sound asleep,” I replied. “My noise problem there—in the crater, as you call it—seems to be mainly vertical. Directly overhead. The rest of the house I can’t hear, thank heaven.”
“Anyway, Nathan comes upstairs and goes to his room. He goes through the door and there’s Sophie all curl
ed up and layin’ on the floor. He walks over to her and stands there—she’s awake—and this is what he says. He says, ’Get out of here, you whore!’ Sophie doesn’t say anything, just lays there cryin’, I guess, and Nathan says, ’Get your ass out of here, whore, I’m leavin’.’ Still Sophie doesn’t say anything and I begin to hear her cry and cry, and then Nathan says, ’I’m goin’ to count to three, whore, and if you’re not up and out of here and out of my sight I’m goin’ to kick your ass into the middle of next year.’ And then he counts to three and she doesn’t move and then he gets down on his knees and begins to slap the livin’ shit out of her.”
“While she’s lying there?” I put in. I had begun to wish that Morris had not felt the need to tell me this story. My stomach stirred with queasy sickishness; though a man of nonviolence, I was nearly overwhelmed by the impulse to rush upstairs, where, accompanied by the Water Music’s sprightly bourrée, I would somehow exorcise the golem by battering its brains out with a chair. “You mean he actually hit that girl while she was lying there like that?”
“Yeah, he kept slappin’ her. Hard, too. Right in the fuckin’ chops he kept slappin’ her.”
“Why didn’t you do something?” I demanded.
He hesitated, cleared his throat, then said, “Well, if you want to know, I’m a physical coward. I’m five foot five and that Nathan—he’s a big motherfucker. But I’ll tell you one thing. I did think about callin’ the police. Sophie was beginnin’ to groan, those clouts in the face must have hurt like a bastard. So I decided to come down here and call the police on the phone. I didn’t have anything on, I don’t wear anything sleepin’. So I went to my closet and put on a bathrobe and slippers—tryin’ to move fast, see? Who knows, I thought he might kill her. I guess I was gone about a minute, at first I couldn’t find my fuckin’ slippers. Then when I got back to the door... Guess what?”
Sophie's Choice Page 8
