This was as true now as it had been on that first night weeks ago in Yetta’s hallway when, as he stormed at Sophie and taunted me about lynchings and snarled “Cracker” in my face, I had caught a glimpse in his fathomless eyes of a wild, elusive discord that sent icewater flooding through my veins. And so as I sat there with Sophie, numb with discomfort, grieving at the appalling transformation which had overtaken this man whom I so cared for and admired, yet with indignation scraping me raw over the anguish he was forcing Sophie to endure, I resolved that I would draw the line as to how far Nathan would proceed in his harassment. He would bully Sophie no more, I decided, and he had fucking well better watch his step with me. This might have been a reasonable decision had I been dealing with a beloved friend who had simply let his temper get out of hand, but hardly (and I was not yet beginning to acquire the first flicker of wisdom to realize it) a man in whom paranoia was a sudden rampaging guest.
“Did you notice something very peculiar in his eyes?” I murmured to Sophie. “Do you think he might have taken too much of that aspirin you got for him, or something?” The innocence of such a question was, I now realize, almost inconceivable, given what was eventually to be revealed to me as the cause for those dilated pupils, the size of dimes; but then, I was learning a lot of new things in those days.
Nathan returned with the opened bottle of wine and sat down. A waiter brought glasses and set them before the three of us. I was relieved to see that the expression on Nathan’s face had softened somewhat, no longer quite the rancorous mask it had been only moments before. But the fierce strait-jacketed tension remained in the muscles of the cheek and neck and also the sweat poured forth: it stood out on his brow in droplets, matching in appearance—I noted irrelevantly—the mosaic of cool dewdrops on the bottle of Chablis. And then I caught sight for the first time of the great crescents of soaked white fabric underneath his arms. He poured wine in our glasses, and although I shrank from looking at Sophie’s face, I saw that her hand, holding the outstretched glass, was quivering. I had committed the major mistake of keeping unfolded on the table beneath my elbow the copy of the Post, with its page turned to the photograph of Bilbo. I saw Nathan glance at the picture and make what appeared to be a smirk full of enormous and wicked self-satisfaction.
“I read that article just a while ago on the subway,” he said, raising his glass. “I propose a toast to the slow, protracted, agonizing death of the Senator from Mississippi, Mushmouth Bilbo.”
I was silent for a moment. Nor did I raise my glass as Sophie did. She lifted hers out of nothing at this point, I was sure, but dumb reflexive obedience. Finally I said as casually as I was able, “Nathan, I want to propose a toast to your success, to your great discovery, whatever it is. To this wonderful thing you’ve been working on that Sophie’s told me about. Congratulations.” I reached forward and lightly, affectionately tapped the back of his arm. “Now let’s cut all this ugly shit”—I tried to inject a jovial, conciliatory note—“and let’s all relax while you tell us, for Christ’s sake, just tell us exactly what the hell it is we’re going to celebrate! Man, tonight we want to make all the toasts to you!”
A disagreeable chill went through me as I felt the brusque deliberateness with which he pulled his arm away from my hand. “That will be impossible,” he said, glaring at me, “my mood of triumph has been seriously compromised if not totally deflated by treachery at the hands of someone I used to love.” Still unable to glance at her, I heard Sophie give a single hoarse sob. “There will be no toast this evening to victorious Hygeia.” He was holding his glass aloft, elbow propped on the table. “We will toast instead the painful demise of Senator Bilbo.”
“You will, Nathan,” I said, “not I. I’m not going to toast anyone’s death—painful or not painful—and neither should you. You of all people should know better. Aren’t you in the healing business? This is not a very funny joke, you know: It’s fucking obscene to toast death.” My sudden pontifical tone was something I seemed unable to repress. I raised my own glass. “To life,” I proposed, “to your life, ours“—I made a gesture which included Sophie—“to health. To your great discovery.” I sensed a note of pleading in my voice, but Nathan remained immobile and grim-faced, refusing to drink. Stymied, feeling a spasm of desperation, I slowly lowered my glass. I also, for the first time, felt a touch of warm rage churning in the region of my abdomen; it was a slow conglomerate anger, directed in equal parts at Nathan’s hateful and dictatorial manner, his foul treatment of Sophie and (I could scarcely believe my own reflex now) his gruesome malediction against Bilbo. When he now failed to respond to my counter-toast, I set my glass down and said with a sigh, “Well, to hell with it, then.”
“To the death of Bilbo,” Nathan persisted, “to the sounds of the screams of his last agony.”
I sensed the blood flashing scarlet somewhere behind my eyes and my heart began a clumsy thumping. It was an effort to control my voice. “Nathan,” I said, “not long ago at one point I paid you a slight compliment. I said that despite your profound animosity toward the South, you at least retained a little sense of humor about it, unlike many people. Unlike the standard New York liberal jackass. But now I’m beginning to see that I was wrong. I’ve got no use for Bilbo and never did, but if you think there’s any comedy in this ham-handed bit about his death, you’re wrong. I refuse to toast the death of any man—”
“You would not toast the death of Hitler?” he put in quickly, with a mean glint in his eye.
It brought me up short. “Of course I would toast the death of Hitler. But that’s a fucking different matter! Bilbo’s not Hitler!” Even while I was replying to Nathan I realized with despair how we were duplicating the substance if not the same words of the enraged colloquy in which we had gotten so wildly embroiled that first afternoon in Sophie’s room. In the time since that deafening quarrel, which had so nearly become a fight, I mistakenly thought he had relinquished his murky idee fixe about the South. At this moment there was in his manner all the identical bottled-up surge of fury and venom which had truly scared me on that radiant Sunday, a day that for so long had seemed comfortably remote. I was scared once more, now to an even greater degree, for I had a grim augury that this time our struggle would not find sweet reconciliation in apologies, jokes and the jolly embrace of friendship. “Bilbo is not Hitler, Nathan,” I repeated. I heard my voice trembling. “Let me tell you something. For as long as I have known you—although it is admittedly not long, so I may have gotten the wrong impression—you have honestly impressed me as being one of the most sophisticated, savvy people I’ve ever known—”
“Don’t embarrass me,” he broke in. “Flattery will get you nowhere.” His voice was rasping, ugly.
“This is not flattery,” I went on, “only the truth. But what I’m getting at is this. Your hatred of the South—which often is clearly tantamount to expressing hatred, or at least dislike, for me—is appalling in anyone who like yourself is so knowing and judicious in so many other ways. It is downright primitive of you, Nathan, to be so blind about the nature of evil...”
In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin. (For a time I thought I might be a lawyer. The profession of law, and the courtrooms in which I once briefly entertained fantasies of playing out dramas like Clarence Darrow, lost only an incompetent stick when I turned to the literary trade.) “You seem to have no sense of history at all,” I went on rapidly, my voice scaling up an octave, “none at all! Could it be because you Jews, having so recently arrived here and living mostly in big Northern cities, are really purblind, and just have no interest in or awareness or any kind of comprehension whatever of the tragic concatenation of events that have produc
ed the racial madness down there? You’ve read Faulkner, Nathan, and you still have this assy and intolerable attitude of superiority toward the place, and are unable to see how Bilbo is less a villain than a wretched offshoot of the whole benighted system?” I paused, drew a breath and said, “I pity you your blindness.” And here had I ceased and left it at that, I might have felt that I had registered a series of telling blows, but, as I say, good sense generally has deserted me in the course of such fevered arguments and my own semihysteric energy now propelled me into regions of deep asininity. “Besides,” I persisted, “you totally fail to realize what a man of real achievement Theodore Bilbo was.” Echoes of my college dissertation rattled about in my head with the filing-card rhythm of scholarly blank verse. “When he was governor, Bilbo brought Mississippi a series of important reforms,” I intoned, “including the creation of a highway commission and a board of pardons. He established the first tuberculosis sanatorium. He added manual training and farm mechanics to the curriculum of the schools. And finally he introduced a program to combat ticks...” My voice trailed off.
“He introduced a program to combat ticks,” Nathan said.
Startled, I realized that Nathan’s gifted voice was in perfect mockery of my own—pedantic, pompous, insufferable. “There was a widespread outbreak of something called Texas fever among the Mississippi cows,” I persisted uncontrollably. “Bilbo was instrumental—”
“You fool,” Nathan interrupted, “you silly klutz. Texas fever! You clown! You want me to point out that the glory of the Third Reich was a highway system unsurpassed in the world and that Mussolini made the trains run on time?”
He had me cold—I must have known it as soon as I heard myself utter the word “ticks”—and the grin that had appeared briefly on his face, a sardonic flash of teeth and a twinkle that recognized the shambles of my defeat, dissolved even as he now firmly lowered his glass.
“Have you finished your lecture?” he demanded in a voice that was too loud. The menace that darkened his face caused me a prickly fear. Suddenly he raised his glass and downed the wine in a single swallow. “This toast,” he announced in a flat tone, “is in honor of my complete dissociation from you two creeps.”
A piercing pang of regret went through my breast at these words. I sensed a heavy emotion roiling inside me that was like the onset of mourning. “Nathan...” I began placatingly, and stretched out my hand. I heard Sophie sob again.
But Nathan ignored my gesture. “Dissociation,” he said, with a tip of his glass at Sophie, “from you, the Coony Chiropractic Cunt of Kings County.” Then to me, “And to you, the Dreary Dregs of Dixie.” His eyes were as lifeless as billiard balls, sweat drained from his face in torrents. I was as intensely conscious—on one level—of these eyes and the skin of his face beneath its shimmering transparency of sweat as I was—on a purely auditory level, so rawly sensitive that I thought my eardrums might pop—of the voices of the Andrews Sisters exploding from the jukebox. “Don’t Fence Me In!” “Now,” he said, “perhaps you will permit me to lecture the two of you. It might do something for the rottenness dwelling at the core of your selves.”
I will skim over all but the worst of his tirade. The whole thing could not have taken more than several minutes, but it seemed hours. Sophie suffered the most fearsome part of his onslaught, and it was plainly closer to intolerable to her than it was to me, who only had to hear it and watch her suffer. By contrast I got off with a relatively light tongue-lashing, and it came first. He bore me no real ill feelings, he said, just contempt. Even his contempt for me was hardly personal, he went on, since I could not be held responsible for my upbringing or place of birth. (He delivered all this with a mocking half-smile and a controlled, soft voice tinged, off and on, incongruously, with the Negro accent I recalled from that faraway Sunday.) For a long time he had entertained the idea that I was a good Southerner, he said, a man emancipated, one who had somehow managed to escape the curse of bigotry which history had bequeathed to the region. He was not so foolishly blind (despite my accusations) as to be unaware that good Southerners did truly exist. He had thought of me as such until recently. But my refusal now to join in his execration of Bilbo only validated what he really had discovered about my “ingrained” and “unregenerate” racism, ever since that night he had read the first part of my book.
My heart fairly shriveled away at these words. “What do you mean?” I said, my voice close to a wail. “I thought you liked—”
“You have a pretty snappy talent in the traditional Southern mode. But you also have all the old clichés. I guess I didn’t want to bruise your feelings. But that old Negro woman in the beginning of the book, the one waiting with the others for the train. She’s a caricature, right out of Amos ’n’ Andy. I thought I was reading a novel by someone brought up writing old-time minstrel shows. It would be funny—that travesty of a Negro—if it weren’t so despicable. You may be writing the first Southern comic book.”
God, how vulnerable I was! I was engulfed by swift despair. If anyone but Nathan had said that! But with those words he had totally undermined the buoyant joy and confidence about my work which his earlier encouragement had implanted within me. It was so unutterably crushing, this sudden brutal brush-off, that I began to feel certain crucial underpinnings of my very soul shudder and disintegrate. I gulpingly struggled for a reply, which would not, strive as I might, get past my lips.
“You’ve been badly infected by that degeneracy,” he continued. “It’s something you can’t help. It doesn’t make you or your book any more attractive but at least it’s possible to feel that you’re more of a passive vessel for the poison rather than a willing—how would you describe it?—a willing disseminator. Like, say, Bilbo.” Now his voice abruptly lost the faint throaty Negroid quality with which it had been touched; in moist metamorphosis the Southern accent faded and died, replaced by thorny Polish diphthongs that were in almost exact mimicry of Sophie’s own speech. And it was here, as I say, that his punishing callousness turned into outright persecution. “Peut-être after all dese mawnths,” he said, leveling his gaze on Sophie, “you kin explain de mystewy of why you are here, you off all people, walking dese stweets, dwenched in enticing perfumery, engaged in suwweptitious venery wiff not wan but two—count dem, ladies and gentlemen—two chiropractors. In short, making hay while de sun shine, to employ an old bwomide, while at Auschwitz de ghosts off de millions off de dead still seek an answer.” Suddenly he dropped the parody. “Tell me why it is, oh beauteous Zawistowska, that you inhabit the land of the living. Did splendid little tricks and stratagems spring from that lovely head of yours to allow you to breathe the clear Polish air while the multitudes at Auschwitz choked slowly on the gas? A reply to this would be most welcome.”
A terrible drawn-out groan escaped Sophie then, so loud and tormented that only the frenzied squalling of the Andrews Sisters prevented it from being heard throughout the entire bar. Mary in her anguish on Calvary could not have made a more wretched noise. I turned to look at Sophie. She had thrust her face downward so that it was buried and out of sight, and had clapped her whiteknuckled fists futilely over her ears. Her tears were trickling down onto the speckled Formica. I thought I heard her muffled words: “No! No! Menteur! Lies!”
“Not so many months ago,” he persisted, “in the depths of the war in Poland, several hundred Jews who escaped from one of the death camps sought refuge at the homes of some fine Polish citizens like yourself. These darling people refused them shelter. Not only this. They murdered practically all the rest they could get their hands on. I have brought this to your attention before. So please answer again. Did the same anti-Semitism for which Poland has gained such world-wide renown—did a similar anti-Semitism guide your own destiny, help you along, protect you, in a manner of speaking, so that you became one of the minuscule handful of people who lived while the millions died?” His voice became harsh, cutting, cruel. “Explanation, please!”
“No! No! No! No!” So
phie sobbed.
I heard my own voice now. “Nathan, for Christ’s sake, lay off her!” I had gotten to my feet.
But he was not to be deterred. “What fine handiwork of subterfuge did you create in order that your skin might be saved while the others went up in smoke? Did you cheat, connive, lay your sweet little ass—“
“No!” I heard her groan, that sound again wrested from her nethermost depths. “No! No!”
I did an inexplicable and, I’m afraid, craven thing then. Having risen fully upright, I was on the absolute verge (I could feel the impulse in me like a powerful vibration) of leaning forward and grasping Nathan by the collar, pulling him to his feet for an eye-to-eye confrontation, as Bogart had done so many times in Bogart’s and my entwined past. I could not suffer what Nathan was doing to her a second more. But having risen, having been galvanized by the impulse, I was with mysterious speed transformed into a triumphant paradigm of chickenshit. I felt a quaking in the knees, my parched mouth gave forth a string of senseless vocables, and then I found myself lurching toward the men’s room, blessed sanctuary from a spectacle of hatred and cruelty such as I had never conceived I would witness firsthand. I’ll only be here for a minute, I thought, leaning over the urinal. I’ve got to collect my senses before I go out and deal with Nathan. In a somnambulist’s stupor I clutched at the handle of the urinal’s valve, an icy dagger in my palm, pumping over and over again sluggish jets of water while the faggot graffiti—Marvin sucks!... Call ULster 1-2316 for dream blowjob—registered for the hundredth time in my brain like demented cuneiform. Since my mother’s death I had not wept, and I knew I would not now, even though the pining lovelorn scrawls against the tiles, blurring into smudge, signaled that I might now come close to weeping. I spent perhaps three or four minutes in this chilly, miserable, indecisive stance. Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being. But when I threw open the door again, I saw that Sophie and Nathan were gone.
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