“And, ah—Sophie and Nathan? Where do they go? And what do they do, by the way, aside from—” I was on the verge of an obvious jest but held my tongue, a point lost in any case, since Morris, so garrulous, so fluently and freely informative, had anticipated what I had been wondering and was rapidly filling me in.
“Nathan’s got an education, he’s a biologist. He works in a laboratory near Borough Hall where they make medicine and drugs and things like that. Sophie Z., I don’t know what she does exactly. I heard she’s some kind of receptionist for a Polish doctor who’s got a whole lot of Polish clients. Naturally, she speaks Polish like a native. Anyway, Nathan and Sophie are beach nuts. When the weather’s good, like now, they go to Coney Island—sometimes Jones Beach. Then they come back here.” He paused and made what seemed to approximate a leer. “They come back here and hump and fight. Boy, do they fight! Then they go out to dinner. They’re very big on good eating. That Nathan, he makes good money, but he’s a weird one, all right. Weird. Real weird. Like, I think he needs psychiatric consultation.”
A phone rang, and Morris let it ring. It was a pay phone attached to the wall, and its ring seemed exceptionally loud, until I realized that it must have been adjusted in such a way as to be heard all over the house. “I don’t answer it when nobody’s here,” Morris said. “I can’t stand that miserable fuckin’ phone, all those messages. ‘Is Lillian there? This is her mother. Tell her she forgot the precious gift her Uncle Bennie brought her.’ Yatata yatata. The pig. Or, ‘This is the father of Moishe Muskatblit. He’s not in? Tell him his cousin Max got run down by a truck in Hackensack.’ Yatata yatata all day long. I can’t stand that telephone.”
I told Morris that I would see him again, and after a few more pleasantries, retired to my room’s nursery-pink and the disquietude that it had begun to cause me. I sat down at my table. The first page of the legal pad, its blankness still intimidating, yawned in front of me like a yellowish glimpse of eternity. How in God’s name would I ever be able to write a novel? I mused, chewing on a Venus Velvet. I opened the letter from my father. I always looked forward to these letters, feeling fortunate to have this Southern Lord Chesterfield as an advisor, who so delighted me with his old-fashioned disquisitions upon pride and avarice and ambition, bigotry, political skulduggery, venereal excess and other mortal sins and dangers. Sententious he might occasionally be, but never pompous, never preacherish in tone, and I relished both the letters’ complexity of thought and feeling and their simple eloquence; whenever I finished one I was usually close to tears, or doubled over with laughter, and they almost always set me immediately to rereading passages in the Bible, from which my father had derived many of his prose cadences and much of his wisdom. Today, though, my attention was first caught by a newspaper clipping which fluttered out from the folds of the letter. The headline of the clipping, which was from the local gazette in Virginia, so stunned and horrified me that I momentarily lost my breath and saw tiny pinpoints of light before my eyes.
It announced the death by suicide, at the age of twenty-two, of a beautiful girl with whom I had been hopelessly in love during several of the rocky years of my early adolescence. Her name was Maria (rhyming in the Southern fashion with “pariah”) Hunt, and at fifteen I had been so feverish in my infatuation for her that it seems in retrospect a small-scale madness. Talk about your lovesick fool, how I exemplified such a wretch! Maria Hunt! For if in the 1940s, long before the dawn of our liberation, the ancient chivalry still prevailed and the plastic June Allysons of a boy’s dreams were demigoddesses with whom one might at most, to use the sociologists’ odious idiom, “pet to climax,” I carried self-abnegation to its mad limit and with my beloved Maria did not even try to cop a feel, as they used to say in those days. Indeed, I did not do so much as place a kiss upon her heartlessly appetizing lips. This is not on the other hand to define our relationship as Platonic, for in my understanding of that word there is an element of the cerebral, and Maria was not at all bright. To which it must be added that in those days of the forty-eight states, when in terms of the quality of public education Harry Byrd’s Virginia was generally listed forty-ninth—after Arkansas, Mississippi and even Puerto Rico—the intellectual tang of the colloquy of two fifteen-year-olds is perhaps best left to the imagination. Never was ordinary conversation cleft by such hiatuses, such prolonged and unembarrassed moments of ruminant non-speech. Nonetheless, I had passionately but chastely adored her, adored her for such a simple-minded reason as that she was beautiful enough to wreck the heart, and now I discovered that she was dead. Maria Hunt was dead!
The advent of the Second World War and my involvement in it had caused Maria to fade out of my life, but she had been many times since in my wistful thoughts. She had killed herself by leaping from the window of a building, and I found to my astonishment that this had occurred only a few weeks before, in Manhattan. I later learned that she had lived around the corner from me, on Sixth Avenue. It was a sign of the city’s inhuman vastness that we had both dwelt for months in an area as compact as Greenwich Village without ever having encountered each other. With a wrench of pain so intense that it was almost like remorse, I pondered whether I might not have been able to save her, to prevent her from taking such a terrible course, had I only known of her existence in the city, and her whereabouts. Reading the article over and over again, I verged very close to a state of real upheaval, and found myself moaning aloud at this senseless story of young despair and loss. Why did she do it? One of the most poignant aspects of the account was that her body had for complicated and obscure reasons gone unidentified, had been buried in a pauper’s grave, and only after a matter of weeks had been disinterred and sent back for final burial in Virginia. I was sickened, nearly broken up by the awful tale—so much so that I abandoned for the rest of the day any idea of work, and recklessly sought a kind of solace in the beer I had stored in the refrigerator. Later I read this passage from my father’s letter:
In re the enclosed item, son, I naturally thought you would be more than interested, inasmuch as I remember how so terribly “keen” you were on young Maria Hunt six or seven years ago. I used to recall with great amusement how you would blush like a tomato at the mere mention of her name, now I can only reflect on that time with the greatest sorrow. We question the good Lord’s way in such a matter but always to no avail. As you certainly know, Maria Hunt came from a tragic household, Martin Hunt a near-alcoholic and always at loose ends, while Beatrice I’m afraid was pretty unremitting and cruel in her moral demands upon people, especially I am told Maria. One thing seems certain, and that is that there was a great deal of unresolved guilt and hatred pervading that sad home. I know you will be affected by this news. Maria was, I remember, a truly lustrous young beauty, which makes it all the worse. Take some comfort from the fact that such beauty was with us for a time...
I brooded over Maria all afternoon, until the shadows lengthened beneath the trees around the park and the children fled homeward, leaving the paths that crisscrossed the Parade Grounds deserted and still. Finally I felt woozy from the beer, my mouth was raw and dry from too many cigarettes, and I lay down on my bed. I soon fell into a heavy sleep that was more than ordinarily invaded by dreams. One of the dreams besieged me, nearly ruined me. Following several pointless little extravaganzas, a ghastly but brief nightmare, and an expertly constructed one-act play, I was overtaken by the most ferociously erotic hallucination I had ever experienced. For now in some sunlit and serene pasture of the Tidewater, a secluded place hemmed around by undulant oak trees, my departed Maria was standing before me, with the abandon of a strumpet stripping down to the flesh—she who had never removed in my presence so much as her bobbysocks. Naked, peach-ripe, chestnut hair flowing across her creamy breasts, desirable beyond utterance, she approached me where I lay stiff as a dagger, importuning me with words delectably raunchy and lewd. “Stingo,” she murmured. “Oh, Stingo, fuck me.” A faint mist of perspiration clung to her skin like aphrodisia, li
ttle blisters of sweat adorned the dark hair of her mound. She wiggled toward me, a wanton nymph with moist and parted mouth, and now bending down over my bare belly, crooning her glorious obscenities, prepared to take between those lips unkissed by my own the bone-rigid stalk of my passion. Then the film jammed in the projector. I woke up in dire distress, staring at a pink ceiling stained with the shadows of the oncoming night, and let out a primeval groan—more nearly a howl—wrenched from the nethermost dungeons of my soul.
But then I felt another nail amplify my crucifixion: they were going at it again upstairs on the accursed mattress. “Stop it!” I roared at the ceiling, and with my forefingers plugged up my ears. Sophie and Nathan! I thought. Fucking Jewish rabbits! Although they might have let up for a brief time, when I listened once more they were still in action—no riotous sport this go-round, however, and no cries or arias, only the bedsprings making a decorous rhythmical twanging—laconic, measured, almost elderly. I did not care that they had slowed down their pace. I hurried—truly raced—outside into the dusk and walked distractedly around the perimeter of the park. Then I began to stroll more slowly along, growing reflective. Walking underneath the trees, I began seriously to wonder if I had not made a grave mistake in coming to Brooklyn. It really was not my element, after all. There was something subtly and inexplicably wrong, and had I been able to use a turn of phrase current some years later, I might have said that Yetta’s house gave off bad vibrations. I was still shaken by that unmerciful, lascivious dream. By their very nature dreams are, of course, difficult of access through memory, but a few are forever imprinted on the brain. With me the most memorable of dreams, the ones that have achieved that haunting reality so intense as to be seemingly bound up in the metaphysical, have dealt with either sex or death. Thus Maria Hunt. No dream had produced in me that lasting reverberation since the morning nearly eight years before, soon after my mother’s burial, when, struggling up from the seaweed-depths of a nightmare, I dreamed I peered out the window of the room at home in which I was still sleeping and caught sight of the open coffin down in the windswept, drenched garden, then saw my mother’s shrunken, cancer-ravaged face twist toward me in the satin vault and gaze at me beseechingly through eyes filmed over with indescribable torture.
I turned back toward the house. I thought I would go and sit down and reply to my father’s letter. I wanted to ask him to tell me in greater detail the circumstances of Maria’s death—probably not knowing at the time, however, that my subconscious was already beginning to grapple with that death as the germinal idea for the novel so lamentably hanging fire on my writing table. But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence. But I must confess that at first, certainly one of them was her distant but real resemblance to Maria Hunt. And what is still ineffaceable about my first glimpse of her is not simply the lovely simulacrum she seemed to me of the dead girl but the despair on her face worn as Maria surely must have worn it, along with the premonitory, grieving shadows of someone hurtling headlong toward death.
At the house Sophie and Nathan were embroiled in combat just outside the door of my room. I heard their voices clear on the summer night, and saw them battling in the hallway as I walked up the front steps.
“Don’t give me any of that, you hear,” I heard him yell.
“You’re a liar! You’re a miserable lying cunt, do you hear me? A cunt!”
“You’re a cunt too,” I heard her throw back at him. “Yes, you’re a cunt, I think.” Her tone lacked aggressiveness.
“I am not a cunt,” he roared. “I can’t be a cunt, you dumb fucking Polack. When are you going to learn to speak the language? A prick I might be, but not a cunt, you moron. Don’t you ever call me that again, you hear? Not that you’ll ever get a chance.”
“You called me that!”
“But that’s what you are, you moron—a two-timing, double-crossing cunt! Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor. Oh God!” he howled, and his voice rose in wild uncontained rage. “Let me out of here before I murder you—you whore! You were born a whore and you’ll die a whore!”
“Nathan, listen...” I heard her plead. And now as I approached closer to the front door I saw the two of them pressed together, defined in obscure relief against the pink hallway where a dangling forty-watt lightbulb, nearly engulfed by a cloud of fluttering moths, cast its palsied chiaroscuro. Dominating the scene by his height and force was Nathan: broad-shouldered, powerful-looking, crowned with a shock of hair swarthy as a Sioux’s, he resembled a more attenuated and frenetic John Garfield, with Garfield’s handsome, crookedly agreeable face—theoretically agreeable, I should say, for now the face was murky with passion and rage, was quite emphatically anything but agreeable, suffused as it was with such an obvious eagerness for violence. He wore a light sweater and slacks and appeared to be in his late twenties. He held Sophie’s arm tight in his grasp, and she flinched before his onslaught like a rosebud quivering in a windstorm. Sophie I could barely see in the dismal light. I was able to discern only her disheveled mane of straw-colored hair and, behind Nathan’s shoulder, about a third of her face. This included a frightened eyebrow, a small mole, a hazel eye, and a broad, lovely swerve of Slavic cheekbone across which a single tear rolled like a drop of quicksilver. She had begun to sob like a bereft child. “Nathan, you must listen, please,” she was saying between sobs. “Nathan! Nathan! Nathan! I’m sorry I called you that.”
He thrust her arm down abruptly and drew back from her. “You fill me with in-fin-ite revulsion,” he shouted. “Pure un-a-dul-ter-a-ted loathing. I’m getting out of here before I murder you!” He wheeled away from her.
“Nathan, don’t go!” she implored him desperately and reached out to him with both hands. “I need you, Nathan. You need me.” There was something plaintive, childlike in her voice, which was light in timbre, almost fragile, breaking a little in the upper register and of a faint huskiness lower down. The Polish accent overlaying it all made it charming or, I thought, would have made it so under less horrible circumstances. “Please don’t go, Nathan,” she cried. “We need each other. Don’t go!”
“Need?” he retorted, turning back toward her. “Me need you? Let me tell you something”—and here he began to shake his entire outstretched hand at her, as his voice grew more outraged and unstrung—“I need you like any goddamned insufferable disease I can name. I need you like a case of anthrax, hear me. Like trichinosis! I need you like a biliary calculus. Pellagra! Encephalitis! Bright’s disease, for Christ’s sake! Carcinoma of the fucking brain, you fucking miserable whore! Aaaahooooo-o-o!” This last was a rising, wavering wail—a spine-chilling sound that mingled fury with lamentation in a way that seemed almost liturgical, like the keening of a maddened rabbi. “I need you like death,” he bellowed in a choked voice. “Death!”
Once more he turned away, and again she said, weeping, “Please don’t go, Nathan!” Then, “Nathan, where are you going?”
He was near the door now, barely two feet away from me where I stood at the threshold, irresolute, not knowing whether to forge on toward my room or to turn and flee. “Going?” he shouted. “I’ll tell you where I’m going—I’m going to get on the first subway train and go to Forest Hills! I’m going to borrow my brother’s car and come back here and load up my things in the car. Then I’m going to clear out of this place.” All of a sudden his voice diminished in volume, his manner became somewhat more collected, even casual, but his tone was dramatically, slyly threatening. “After that, maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit down and write a registered letter to the Immigration Service. I’m going to tell them that you’ve got the wrong visa. I’m going to tell them that they should issue you a whore’s visa,
if they’ve got one. If they don’t, I’m going to tell them they’d better ship you back to Poland for peddling your ass to any doctor in Brooklyn that wants a quick lay. Back to Cracow, baby!” He gave a satisfied chuckle. “Oh, baby, back to Cracow!”
He turned and plunged out the door. As he did so he brushed against me, and this caused him to whirl about again and draw up short. I could not tell whether he thought I had overheard him or not. Clearly winded, he was panting heavily and he eyed me up and down for a moment. Then I felt that he thought I had overheard, but it didn’t matter. Considering his emotional state, I was surprised at his way with me, which if not exactly gracious seemed at least momentarily civil, as if I had been magnanimously excluded from the territory of his rage.
“You the new roomer Fink told me about?” he managed between breaths.
I answered in the feeblest, briefest affirmative.
“You’re from the South,” he said. “Morris told me you were from the South. Said your name’s Stingo. Yetta needs a Southerner in her house to fit in with all the other funnies.” He sent a dark glance back toward Sophie, then looked at me and said, “Too bad I won’t be around for a lively conversation, but I’m getting out of here. It would have been nice to talk with you.” And here his tone became faintly ominous, the forced civility tapering off into the baldest sarcasm I had heard in a long time. “We’d have had great fun, shootin’ the shit, you and I. We could have talked about sports. I mean Southern sports. Like lynching niggers—or coons, I think you call them down there. Or culture. We could have talked about Southern culture, and maybe could have sat around here at old Yetta’s listening to hillbilly records. You know, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff and all those other standard bearers of classical Southern culture.” He had been scowling as he spoke, but now a smile parted his dark, troubled face and before I knew it he had reached out and clasped my unwilling hand in a firm handshake. “Ah well, that’s what could have been. Too bad. Old Nathan’s got to hit the road. Maybe in another life, Cracker, we’ll get together. So long, Cracker! See you in another life.”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 163
