I had read quite a bit about sexual problems while studying at that noted athenaeum of psychology, Duke University, and had come away with some fairly well established facts: that male primates in captivity, for instance, when denied female companionship, will try to bugger each other, often with gleeful success, and that many prisoners after long periods of incarceration will turn so readily to homosexual activity that it will almost appear to be the norm. Men who have been many months at sea will take their pleasure with one another; and when I was in the Marine Corps (a branch, of course, of the Navy) I was intrigued to learn the ancient origin of “pogey bait,” the slang name for candy: it obviously sprang from the inducement held out by older sailors for the favors of fair-cheeked, smooth-bottomed young cabin boys. Ah well, I thought, if I have become a pederast, so be it; there was ample precedent for my condition, since although I had not been formally confined or caged, I may have just as well been in prison or on a timeless voyage on a brigantine as far as my lifelong efforts at good, wholesome, heterosexual screwing were concerned. Was it not plausible that some psychic valve in me, analogous to whatever controls the libido of a twenty-year convict or a lovelorn ape, had blown its gaskets, leaving me guiltlessly different, victim of the pressures of biological selection but nonetheless a pervert?
I was darkly considering this proposition, and then Jack’s commotion at the door brought me up sharp. “Wake up, junior, there’s a telephone call!” he shouted. I knew on the way downstairs that the call could only come from the Pink Palace, where I had left Jack’s number, and I had a sense of foreboding which was amplified enormously when I heard the familiar voice, dolorosa, of Morris Fink.
“You got to come down here right away,” he said, “all hell has broke loose.”
My heart faltered, then raced on. “What happened?” I whispered.
“Nathan’s went off his trolley again. This time it’s real bad. The miserable fucker.”
“Sophie!” I said. “How is Sophie?”
“She’s all right. He beat her up again, but she’s all right. He said he was goin’ to kill her. She ran out of the house and I don’t know where she is. But she asked me to call you. You’d better come.”
“And Nathan?” I said.
“He’s gone too, but he said he’d be back. The crazy bastard. You think I should call the police?”
“No, no,” I replied quickly. “For Christ’s sake, don’t call the police!” After a pause I said, “I’ll be there. Try and find Sophie.”
After I hung up I stewed for a few minutes, and when Jack came downstairs I joined him in a cup of coffee to try to settle my agitation. I had spoken to him before about Sophie and Nathan and their folie à deux but only in dim outline. Now I felt compelled to hurriedly fill in some of the more painful details. His immediate suggestion was to do what for some dumb reason it had not occurred to me to do. “You’ve got to call the brother,” he insisted.
“Of course,” I said. I jumped to the phone again, only to be met with that impasse which more often than not throughout life seems to stymie people at moments of extreme crisis. A secretary told me that Larry was in Toronto, where he was attending a professional convention. His wife was with him. In those antediluvian pre-jet days Toronto was as far away as Tokyo, and I gave a moan of despair. Then just as I had hung up, again the phone rang. Once more it was the steadfast Fink, whose troglodyte manners I had cursed so often but whom I now blessed.
“I just heard from Sophie,” he said.
“Where is she?” I shouted.
“She was at the office of that Polish doctor she works for. But she’s not there now. She went out to the hospital to get an x-ray of her arm. She said Nathan might of broke it, the fuckin’ bum. But she wants you to come down. She’ll stay at that doctor’s office this afternoon until you get there.” And so I went.
For many young people in the throes of late-adolescent growth, the twenty-second year is the most anxiety-filled of all. I realize now how intensely discontented, rebellious and troubled I was at that age, but also how my writing had kept serious emotional distress safely at bay, in the sense that the novel I was working on served as a cathartic instrument through which I was able to discharge on paper many of my more vexing tensions and miseries. My novel of course was more than this, too, yet it was the vessel I have described, which is why I so cherished it as one cherishes the very tissues of one’s being. Still, I was quite vulnerable; fissures would appear in the armor I had wrapped around me, and there were moments when I was assaulted by Kierkegaardian dread. The afternoon I hurried away from Jack Brown’s to find Sophie was one of these times—an ordeal of extreme fragility, ineffectualness and self-loathing. On the bus rocking south through New Jersey to Manhattan, I sat cramped and exhausted in a nearly indescribable miasma of fright. I had a hangover, for one thing, and the jangling nervousness heightened my apprehension, causing me to shudder at the coming showdown with Sophie and Nathan. My failure with Mary Alice (I had not even said goodby to her) had unpinned the very moorings of what was left of my virility, and made me all the more despondent over the suspicion that throughout these years I had deluded myself about my faggot propensities. Somewhere near Fort Lee, I caught a reflected glimpse of my ashen, unhappy face superimposed against a panorama of filling stations and drive-ins and tried to close my eyes and mind to the horror of existence.
The hour was getting on toward five in the afternoon by the time I made it to Dr. Blackstock’s office in downtown Brooklyn. It was apparently after office hours, for the reception room was empty save for a rather pinched and spinsterish woman who alternated with Sophie as secretary-receptionist; she told me that Sophie, who had been gone since late morning, had not yet returned from having her arm x-rayed but should be back at any moment. She invited me to sit and wait, but I preferred to stand, and then found myself pacing about restlessly in a room painted—drowned would be more exact—in the most gruesome shade of deep purple I had ever seen. How Sophie had worked day after day basking in such a creepy hue baffled me. The walls and ceiling were done in the same mortician’s magenta which Sophie had told me adorned the Blackstock home in St. Albans. I wondered if such berserk decorator’s witchery might not also have been concocted by the late Sylvia, whose photograph—decked with black bunting, like that of a saint—smiled down from one wall with a kind of engulfing benignancy. Other photographs plastered everywhere attested to Blackstock’s familiarity with the demigods and goddesses of pop culture, in one after another frantically gemütlich display of palship: Blackstock with a popeyed Eddie Cantor, Blackstock with Grover Whalen, with Sherman Billingsley and Sylvia at the Stork Club, with Major Bowes, with Walter Winchell, even Blackstock with the Andrews Sisters, the three songbirds with their plentiful hair closely surrounding his face like large grinning bouquets, the doctor poutingly proud above the inked scrawl: Love to Hymie from Patty, Maxene and LaVerne. In the morbid, nervous mood I was in, the pictures of the merry chiropractor and his friends brought me as far down into bottomless despondency as I had ever been, and I prayed for Sophie to arrive and help relieve my angst. And just then she came through the door.
Oh, my poor Sophie. She was hollow-eyed and disheveled, exhausted-looking, and the skin of her face had the washed-out sickly blue of skim milk—but mainly she looked aged, an old lady of forty. I took her gently in my arms and we said nothing for a while. She did not weep. Finally I looked at her and said, “Your arm. How is it?”
“It’s not broken,” she replied, “just a bad bruise.”
“Thank God,” I said, then added, “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,“ she murmured, shaking her head, “I just don’t know.”
“We’ve got to do something,” I said, “we’ve got to get him in some kind of custody where he won’t harm you.” I paused, a sense of futility overpowering me, along with ugly guilt. “I should have been here,” I groaned. “I had no business going away. I might have been able to—”
But Sophie halte
d me, saying, “Hush, Stingo. You mustn’t feel that way. Let’s go get a drink.”
Sitting on a stool at the fake-morocco bar of a hideous mirrored Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street, Sophie told me what had happened during my absence. It was bliss at first, unqualified joy. She had never known Nathan to be in such a serene and sunny mood. Much preoccupied with our coming trip south, and plainly looking forward to the wedding day, he went into a kind of prothalamic fit, taking Sophie through a weekend buying spree (including a special excursion to Manhattan, where they spent two hours at Saks Fifth Avenue) during which she wound up with a huge sapphire engagement ring, a trousseau fit for a Hollywood princess, and a wildly expensive travel wardrobe calculated to knock the eyes out of the natives of such backwater centers as Charleston, Atlanta and New Orleans. He had even thought to drop into Cartier’s, where he had bought me a watch as a best man’s gift. Subsequent evenings they spent boning up on Southern geography and Southern history, both of them tackling various travel guides and he spending long hours with Lee’s Lieutenants as preparation for the tours around the Virginia battlefields I had promised to inflict upon them.
It was all done in Nathan’s careful, intelligent, methodical way, with as much attention to the arcana of the various regions we would be traveling through (the botany of cotton and peanuts, the origins of certain local dialects such as Gullah and Cajun, even the physiology of alligators) as that of a British colonial empire builder of the Victorian era setting forth toward the sources of the Nile. He infected Sophie with his enthusiasm, imparting to her all sorts of useful and useless information about the South, which he accumulated in gobs and bits like lint; loving Nathan, she loved it all, including such worthless lore as the fact that more peaches are grown in Georgia than in any other state and that the highest point in Mississippi is eight hundred feet. He went so far as to go around to the Brooklyn College library and check out two novels by George Washington Cable. He developed an adorable drawl, which filled her with gaiety.
Why had she not been able to detect the warning signals when they began to glimmer? She had watched him carefully all this time, she was certain he had stopped taking his amphetamines. But then the day before, when they had both gone to work—she to Dr. Blackstock’s, he to his “lab”—something must have caused him to slip off the path, just what, she would never know. In any case, she was stupidly off guard and vulnerable when he put out the first signals, as he had before, and she failed to read their portent: the euphoric telephone call from Pfizer, the voice too high-pitched and excited, the announcement of incredible victories in the offing, a grandiose “breakthrough,” a majestic scientific discovery. How could she have been so dumb? Her description of Nathan’s furious eruption and the ensuing damage and debris was for me—in my frazzled state—agreeably laconic, but somehow more searing by its very brevity.
“Morty Haber was giving a party for a friend who was going off for a year to study in France. I worked late to help send out bills at the office and I had told Nathan that I would eat near the office and meet him later at the party. Nathan didn’t come until long after I got there, but I could tell when I first saw him how high he was. I almost fainted when I saw him, knowing that he’d probably been that way all day, even when I got that phone call, and that I had been too stupid to even—well, even be alarmed. At the party he behaved all right. I mean, he wasn’t... unruly or anything but I could tell so well he was on Benzedrine. He talked to some people about his new cure for polio, and my heart sort of died. I said to myself then that maybe Nathan would come down off this high and just go to sleep finally. Sometimes he would do that, you know, without getting violent. Finally Nathan and I went home, it was not too late, about twelve-thirty. It was only when we got home that he began screaming at me, building up into this great rage. Doing what he always done, you know, when he was in the middle of his worst tempête, which is to accuse me of being unfaithful to him. Of, well, screwing somebody else.”
Sophie halted for an instant, and as she raised her left hand to throw back a lock of hair I sensed something slightly unnatural in the gesture, wondered what it was, then realized that she was favoring her right arm, which hung limply at her side. It obviously was causing her pain.
“Who was he after you about this time?” I demanded. “Blackstock? Seymour Katz? Oh Christ, Sophie, if the poor guy wasn’t so wacky, I wouldn’t be able to stand this without wanting to knock his teeth out. Jesus, who does he have you cuckolding him with now?”
She shook her head violently, the bright hair tossing in an uncombed and untidy way above the forlorn, haggard face. “It don’t matter, Stingo,” she said, “just somebody.”
“Well, then what else happened?”
“He screamed and shouted at me. He took more Benzedrine—maybe cocaine too, I don’t know what exactly. Then he went out the door with this enormous slam. He shouted that he was never coming back. I lay there in the dark, I couldn’t sleep for a long time, I was so worried and scared. I thought of calling you but it was terribly late by then. Finally I couldn’t stay awake any more and went to sleep. I don’t know how long I slept, but when he come back it was dawn. He come in the room like an explosion. Raving, shouting. He woke up the whole house again. He dragged me out of bed and throwed me on the floor and shouted at me. About me having sex with—well, this man, and how he would kill me and this man and himself. Oh mon Dieu, Stingo, never, never was Nathan in such a state, never! He kicked me hard finally—hard, on the arm here, and then he left. And later I left. And that was all.” Sophie fell silent.
I put my face down slowly and gently on the mahogany surface of the bar with its damp patina of cigarette ash and water rings, wanting desperately to be overtaken by coma or some other form of beneficent unconsciousness. Then I raised my head and looked at Sophie, saying, “Sophie, I don’t want to say this. But Nathan simply must be put away. He’s dangerous. He has to be confined.” I heard gurgle up in my voice a sob, vaguely ludicrous. “Forever.”
With a trembling hand she signaled to the bartender and asked for a double whiskey on ice. I felt I could not dissuade her, even though her speech already had a glutinous, slurred quality. After the drink came she took a hefty gulp and then, turning to me, said, “There is something else I didn’t tell you. About when he come back at dawn.”
“What?” I said.
“He had a gun. A pistol.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit,” I heard myself murmur, a cracked record. “Shit, shit, shit, shit...”
“He said he was going to use it. He pointed it at my head. But he didn’t use it.”
I made a whispered, not entirely blasphemous invocation, “Jesus Christ, have mercy.”
But we could not just sit there bleeding to death with these gaping wounds. After a long silence I decided on a course of action. I would go with Sophie to the Pink Palace and help her pack up. She would leave the house immediately, taking a room for that night, at least, in the St. George Hotel, which was not far away from her office. Meanwhile, throughout all this, I would somehow find the means to get in touch with Larry in Toronto, telling him of the extreme danger of the situation and urging him to come back at all costs. Then, with Sophie safely in her temporary seclusion, I would do my damnedest to find Nathan and somehow deal with him—though this prospect filled my stomach with dread like a huge, sick football. I was so unstrung that even as I sat there I came close to regurgitating my single beer. “Let’s go,” I said. “Now.”
At Mrs. Zimmerman’s I paid that faithful mole Morris Fink fifty cents to help us cope with Sophie’s baggage. She was sobbing and, I could see, rather drunk as she tramped about her room stuffing clothes and cosmetics and jewelry into a large suitcase.
“My beautiful suits from Saks,” she mumbled. “Oh, what should I do with them?”
“Take them with you, for Christ’s sake,” I said impatiently, heaving her many pairs of shoes into another bag. “Forget protocol at a time like this. You’ve got to
hurry. Nathan might be coming back.”
“And my lovely wedding dress? What shall I do with it?”
“Take it, too! If you can’t wear it, maybe you can hock it.”
“Hock?” she said.
“Pawn.”
I had not meant to be cruel, but my words caused Sophie to drop a silk slip to the floor and then raise her hands to her face, and bawl loudly, and shed helpless, glistening tears. Morris looked on morosely as I held her for a moment and uttered futile soothing sounds. It was dark outside and the roar of a truck horn along a nearby street made me jump, shredding my nerve endings like some evil hacksaw. To the general hubbub was added now the monstrous jangle of the telephone in the hallway, and I think I must have stifled a groan, or perhaps a scream. I became even further unstrung when Morris, having silenced the Gorgon by answering it, bellowed out the news that the call was for me.
It was Nathan. It was Nathan, all right. Plainly, unmistakably, unequivocally it was Nathan. Then why for an instant did my mind play an odd trick on me, so that I thought it was Jack Brown calling up from Rockland County to check on the situation? It was because of the Southern accent, that perfectly modulated mimicry which made me believe that the possessor of such a voice had to be one teethed on fatback and grits. It was as Southern as verbena or foot-washing Baptists or hound dogs or John C. Calhoun, and I think I even smiled when I heard it say, “What’s cookin’, sugah? How’s your hammer hangin’?”
“Nathan!” I exclaimed with contrived heartiness. “How are you? Where are you? God, it’s good to hear from you!”
“We still gonna take that trip down South? You and me an’ ol’ Sophie? Gonna do the Dixie tour?”
I knew that I had to humor him in some way, make small talk while trying at the same time to discover his whereabouts—a subtle matter—so I replied instantly, “You’re damn right we’re going to make that trip, Nathan. Sophie and I were just talking it over. God, those are sensational clothes you bought her! Where are you now, old pal? I’d love to come and see you. I want to tell you about this little side trip I’ve got planned—”
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