“I need not tell you that Nathan regards you highly,” Larry said, “and really, that’s partly why I’ve asked you to come here. As a matter of fact, in the short time I think he’s known you I’m certain that you’ve become maybe his best friend. He’s told me all about your work, what a hell of a good writer he thinks you are. You’re tops in his book. There was a time, you know—I guess he must have told you—when he considered writing himself. He could have been almost anything, under the proper circumstances. Anyway, as I’m sure you’ve been able to tell, he’s got very keen literary judgments, and I think it might give you a charge to know that he not only thinks you’re writing a swell novel but thinks the world of you as a—well, as a mensh.”
I nodded, coughing up something noncommittal, and felt a flush of pleasure. God, how eagerly I lapped up such praise! But I still remained puzzled about the purpose of my visit. What I then said, I realize now, inadvertently brought us to focus upon Nathan much more quickly than we might have done had the talk continued in respect to my talent and my sterling personal virtues. “You’re right about Nathan. It’s really remarkable, you know, to find a scientist who gives a damn about literature, much less has this enormous comprehension of literary values. I mean, here he is—a first-rate research biologist in a huge company like Pfizer—”
Larry interrupted me gently, with a smile that could not quite mask the pain behind the expression. “Excuse me, Stingo—I hope I can call you that—excuse me, but I want to tell you this right away, along with the other things you must know. But Nathan is not a research biologist. He is not a bona-fide scientist, and he has no degree of any kind. All that is a simple fabrication. I’m sorry, but you’d better know this.”
God in heaven! Was I fated to go through life a gullible and simple-minded waif, with those whom I cared for the most forever pulling the wool over my eyes? It was bad enough that Sophie had lied to me so often, now Nathan—“But I don’t understand,” I began, “do you mean—”
“I mean this,” Larry put in gently. “I mean that this biologist business is my brother’s masquerade—a cover, nothing more than that. Oh, he does report in to Pfizer each day. He does have a job in the company library, an undemanding sinecure where he can do a lot of reading without bothering anyone, and occasionally he does a little research for one of the legitimate biologists on the staff. It keeps him out of harm’s way. No one knows about it, least of all that sweet girl of his, Sophie.”
I was as close to being speechless as I had ever been. “But how...” I struggled for words.
“One of the chief officials of the company is a close friend of our father’s. Just a very nice favor. It was easy enough to arrange, and when Nathan’s in control of himself he apparently does a good job at the little he is required to do. After all, as you well know, Nathan is boundlessly bright, maybe a genius. It’s just that most of his life he’s been haywire, off the track. I have no doubt that he could have been fantastically brilliant at anything he might have tried out. Writing. Biology. Mathematics. Medicine. Astronomy. Philology. Whatever. But he never got his mind in order.” Larry gave again his wan, pained smile and pressed the palms of his hands silently together. “The truth is that my brother’s quite mad.”
“Oh Christ,” I murmured.
“Paranoid schizophrenic, or so the diagnosis goes, although I’m not at all sure if those brain specialists really know what they’re up to. At any rate, it’s one of those conditions where weeks, months, even years will go by without a manifestation and then—pow!—he’s off. What’s aggravated the situation horribly in these recent months is these drugs he’s been getting. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Oh Christ,” I said again.
Sitting there, listening to Larry tell me these wretched things with such straightforward resignation and equanimity, I tried to still the turmoil in my brain. I felt stricken by an emotion that was very nearly grief, and I could not have been victim of more shock and chagrin had he told me that Nathan was dying of some incurably degenerative physical disease. I began to stammer, grasping at scraps, straws. “But it’s so hard to believe. When he told me about Harvard—”
“Oh, Nathan never went to Harvard. He never went to any college. Not that he wasn’t more than capable mentally, of course. On his own he’s read more books already than I ever will in my lifetime. But when one is as sick as Nathan has been one simply cannot find the continuity to get a formal education. His real schools have been Sheppard Pratt, McLean’s, Payne Whitney, and so on. You name the expensive funny farm and he has been a student there.”
“Oh, it’s so goddamned sad and awful,” I heard myself whisper. “I knew he was...” I hesitated.
“You mean you have known that he was not exactly stable. Not... normal.”
“Yes,” I replied, “I guess any fool could tell that. But I just didn’t know how—well, how serious it was.”
“Once there was a time—a period of about two years when he was in his late teens—when it looked as if he were going to be completely well. It was an illusion, of course. Our parents were living in a fine house in Brooklyn Heights then, it was a year or so before the war. One night after a furious argument Nathan took it into his head to try to burn the house down, and he almost did. That was when we had to put him away for a long period. It was the first time... but not the last.”
Larry’s mention of the war reminded me of a puzzling matter which had nagged at me ever since I had known Nathan but which for one reason or another I had ignored, filing it away in some idle and dusty compartment of my mind. Nathan was, of course, of an age which logically would have required him to spend time in the armed forces, but since he had never volunteered any information about his service, I had left the subject alone, assuming that it was his business. But now I could not resist asking, “What did Nathan do during the war?”
“Oh God, he was strictly 4-F. During one of his lucid periods he did try to join up with the paratroopers, but we nipped that one in the bud. He couldn’t have served anywhere. He stayed home and read Proust and Newton’s Principia. And from time to time paid his visits to Bedlam.”
I was silent for a long moment, trying to absorb as best I could all this information which validated so conclusively the misgivings I had had about Nathan—misgivings and suspicions which up until now I had successfully repressed. I sat there brooding, silent, and then a lovely dark-haired woman of about thirty entered the room, walked to Larry’s side and, touching his shoulder, said, “I’m going out for a minute, darling.” When I rose Larry introduced her to me as his wife, Mimi.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” she said, taking my hand, “I think maybe you can help us with Nathan. You know, we care so much for him. He’s talked about you so often that somehow I feel you’re a younger brother.”
I said something mild and accommodating, but before I could add anything else she announced, “I’m going to leave you two alone to talk. I hope I’ll see you again.” She was stunningly pretty and meltingly pleasant, and as I watched her depart, moving with easy undulant grace across the thick carpet of the room—which for the first time I perceived in all of its paneled, hospitably warm, book-lined, unostentatious luxury—my heart gave a heave: Why, instead of the floundering, broke, unpublished writer that I was, couldn’t I be an attractive, intelligent, well-paid Jewish urologist with a sexy wife?
“I don’t know how much Nathan ever told you about himself. Or about our family.” Larry poured me another ale.
“Not much,” I said, momentarily surprised that this indeed was so.
“I won’t bore you with a great deal of detail, but our father made—well, quite a few bucks. In, of all things, canning kosher soups. When he arrived here from Latvia he spoke not a word of English, and in thirty years he made, well, a bundle. Poor old man, he’s in a nursing home now—a very expensive nursing home. I don’t mean to sound vulgar. I’m only bringing this up to emphasize the kind of medical care the fam
ily has been able to afford for Nathan. He’s had the very best treatment that money can buy, but nothing has really worked on a permanent basis.’’
Larry paused, and with the pause came a drawn-out sigh, touched with hurt and melancholy. “So for all these last years it’s been in and out of Payne Whitney or Riggs or Menninger or wherever, with these long periods of relative tranquillity when he acts as normally as you or I. When we got him this little job at the Pfizer library we thought it might be a time when he had undergone a permanent remission. Such remissions or cures are not unheard of. In fact, there’s a reasonably high rate of cure. He seemed so content there, and although it did get back to us that he was boasting to people and magnifying his job all out of proportion, that was harmless enough. Even his grandiose delusions about creating some new medical marvel haven’t harmed anyone. It looked as if he had settled down, was on his way to—well, normality. Or as normal as a nut can ever become. But now there’s this sweet, sad, beautiful, fouled-up Polish girl of his. Poor kid. He’s told me they’re going to get married—and what do you, Stingo, think of that?”
“He can’t get married, can he, when he’s like this?” I said.
“Hardly.” Larry halted. “But how can one prevent him, either? If he were out-and-out uncontrollably insane, we would have to put him away forever. That would solve everything. But the terrible difficulty, you see, lies in the fact that there are these lengthy periods when he appears to be normal. And who is to say that one of these long remissions doesn’t really represent what amounts to a complete cure? There are many such cases on record. How can you penalize a man and prevent him from living a life like everyone else by simply assuming the worst, assuming that he will go completely berserk again, when such might not be the case? And yet suppose he marries that nice girl and suppose they have a baby. Then suppose he really goes off his rocker again. How unfair that would be to—well, to everyone!” After a moment’s silence he gazed at me with a penetrating look and said, “I don’t have any answer. Do you have an answer?” He sighed again, then said, “Sometimes I think life is a hideous trap.”
I stirred restlessly in my chair, suddenly so unutterably depressed that I felt I was bearing on my back the weight of all the universe. How could I tell Larry that I had just seen his brother, my beloved friend, as close to the brink as he had ever been? Throughout my life I had heard about madness, and considering it an unspeakable condition possessed by poor devils raving in remote padded cells, had thought it safely beyond my concern. Now madness was squatting in my lap. “What is it that you think I can do?” I asked. “I mean, why did you—”
“Why did I ask you here?” he interrupted gently. “I’m not quite sure that I know myself. I think it’s because I have an idea that you could be useful in helping him stay off the drugs. That’s the most treacherous problem for Nathan now. If he stays away from that Benzedrine, he might have a fair chance to straighten himself out. I can’t do much. We’re very close in many ways—whether I like it or not, I am a kind of model for Nathan—but I also realize that I am an authority figure that he’s apt to resent. Besides, I don’t see him that frequently. But you—you’re really close to him and he respects you, too. I’m just wondering if there isn’t some way in which you might be able to persuade him—no, that’s too strong a word—to influence him so that he lays off that stuff that might kill him. Also—and I wouldn’t ask you to be a spy if Nathan weren’t in such a perilous condition—also, you could simply keep tabs on him and report back to me by phone from time to time, letting me know how he’s getting on. I’ve felt completely out of touch so often, and rather helpless, but if I could just hear from you now and then, you’d be doing all of us a great service. Does any of this seem unreasonable?”
“No,” I said, “of course not. I’d be glad to help. Help Nathan. And Sophie too. They’re very close to me.” Somehow I felt it was time to go, and I rose to shake Larry’s hand. “I think things might get better,” I murmured with what could only seem, in the innermost part of my conscience, despairing optimism.
“I certainly hope so,” said Larry, but the look on his face, forlorn despite his twisted effort at a smile, made me feel that his optimism was as bleak and troubled as my own.
I’m afraid that soon after my meeting with Larry, I was guilty of a grave dereliction. Larry’s brief conference with me had been in the nature of an appeal on his part, an appeal to me to keep an eye on Nathan and to act as liaison between the Pink Palace and himself—to serve both as sentinel and as a kind of benign watchdog who might be able to gently nip at Nathan’s heels and keep him under control. Plainly, Larry thought that during this delicate hiatus in Nathan’s period of drug addiction I might be able to calm him, settle him down, and perhaps even work some lasting, worthwhile effect. After all, wasn’t this what good friends were for? But I copped out (a phrase not then in use, but perfectly descriptive of my negligence, or, to be more exact, my abandonment). I have sometimes wondered whether if I had stayed on the scene during those crucial days I might not have been able to exercise some control over Nathan, preventing him from going on his last slide toward ruin, and too often the answer to myself has been a desolating “yes” or “probably.” And shouldn’t I have tried to tell Sophie of the grim matters I had learned from Larry? But since, of course, I cannot ever be perfectly certain of what would have happened, I have tended always to reassure myself through the flimsy excuse that Nathan was in the process of a furious, unalterable and predetermined plunge toward disaster—a plunge in which Sophie’s destiny was welded indissolubly to his own.
One of the odd things about this was that I was gone for a short time—less than ten days. Except for my Saturday jaunt with Sophie to Jones Beach, it was my only journey outside the confines of New York City since my arrival in the metropolis many months before. And the trip was barely beyond the city limits at that—to a peaceful rustic house in Rockland County barely half an hour by car north of the George Washington Bridge. This was all the result of another unexpected voice on the telephone. The caller was an old Marine Corps friend who had the notably unexceptional name of Jack Brown. The call had been a total surprise, and when I asked Jack how in God’s name he had tracked me down, he said that it had been simple: he had telephoned down to Virginia and had obtained my number from my father. I was delighted to hear the voice: the Southern cadence, as rich and broad as the muddy rivers that flowed through the low-country South Carolina of Jack Brown’s birth, tickled my ear like beloved banjo music long unheard. I asked Jack how he was doing. “Fine, boy, just fine,” he replied, “livin’ up here among the Yankees. Want you to come up here to pay me a visit.”
I adored Jack Brown. There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in afteryears, no matter how genuine; Jack was one of these friends. He was bright, compassionate, well-read, with a remarkably inventive comic gift and a wonderful nose for frauds and four-flushers. His wit, which was often scathing and which relied on a subtle use of Southern courthouse rhetoric (doubtless derived in part from his father, a distinguished judge), had kept me laughing during the enervating wartime months at Duke, where the Marine Corps, in its resolve to transform us from green cannon fodder into prime cannon fodder, tried to stuff us with two years’ education in less than a year, thereby creating a generation of truly half-baked college graduates. Jack was a bit older than I—a critical nine months or so—and thus became chronologically scheduled to see combat, whereas I was lucky and escaped with my hide intact. The letters he wrote to me from the Pacific—after military exigencies had separated us and he was preparing for the assault on Iwo Jima while I was still studying platoon tactics in the swamps of North Carolina—were wondrous long documents, drolly obscene and touched with a raging yet resigned hilarity which I assumed was Jack’s exclusive property until I saw it miraculously resurrected years later in Catch-22. Even when he was horribly woun
ded—he lost most of one of his legs on Iwo Jima—he maintained a cheerfulness I could only describe as exalted, writing me letters from his hospital bed that bubbled with a mixture of joie de vivre and Swiftian corrosiveness and energy. I am sure it was only his mad and sovereign stoicism that prevented him from falling into suicidal despair. He was completely unperturbed by his artificial limb, which, he said, gave him a kind of seductive limp, like Herbert Marshall.
I remark upon all this only to give an idea of Jack’s exceptional allure as a person, and to explain why I jumped at his invitation at the cost of neglecting my obligations in regard to Nathan and Sophie. At Duke, Jack had wanted to become a sculptor, and now after postwar study at the Art Students’ League, he had removed himself to the serene little hills behind Nyack to fashion huge objects in cast iron and sheet metal—aided (he allowed to me without reticence) by what might be construed as a fine dowry, since his bride was the daughter of one of the biggest cotton-mill owners in South Carolina. When at first I made some faint-hearted objections, saying that my novel which was rolling along so well might suffer from the abrupt interruption, he put an end to my worries by insisting that his house had a small wing where I could work all by myself. “Also, Dolores,” he added, referring to his wife, “has her sister up here visiting. Her name is Mary Alice. She’s a very filled-out twenty-one and, son, believe me, she’s pretty as a picture. By Renoir, that is. She’s also very eager.” I happily pondered that word eager. It may be easily assumed, given my perennially renewed, pathetic hope for sexual fulfillment as already set down in this chronicle, that I needed no further enticement.
Sophie's Choice (Open Road) Page 60
