She was silent for a moment, her face pensive and lovely. Then she said, “In truth, I was very confused. It had been so long—oh, so very long—since I had any, how shall I say”—she paused again, mildly at a loss for words—“any connection with a man, any man, you know what I mean. I had not cared about it this much, it was a part of my life that was not terribly important, since I was putting so much of the rest of my life together. My health, for the principal thing. At that moment I only knew that Nathan was saving my life, and I did not think much of what would happen later. Oh, I suppose I think from time to time how I am in Nathan’s debt for all this, but you know—and it is funny now, Stingo—all of this had to do with money. That was the part that most confused me. The money. At night in the hospital I would lie there and stay awake and think over and over again: Look, I am in a private room. And Dr. Hatfield must cost hundreds of dollars. How will I ever pay for this? I had terrible fantasies. The worse one was about going to Dr. Blackstock for a loan and he asking me why, and me having to explain that it was to pay for this treatment, and Dr. Blackstock getting angry with me for becoming cured by a medical doctor. I don’t know why, I have this great fondness for Dr. Blackstock that Nathan don’t understand. Anyway, I did not want to hurt him, and I had such bad dreams over the money part...
“Well, there is no need to disguise anything. In the end Nathan pay for it all—someone have to—but by the time he pay for it, there was nothing for me to be embarrassed about really, or ashamed. We were in love, that is to make a long story short, and it wasn’t that much to pay anyway, since of course Larry would take nothing, then also Dr. Hatfield asked nothing. We were in love and I was getting healthy taking these many iron pills, which was all I needed for making me to bloom like a rose.” She halted and a cheerful little giggle escaped her lips. “Stinking infinitive!” she blurted affectionately, mocking Nathan’s tutorial manner. “Not to bloom, just bloom!”
“It’s really incredible,” I said, “the way he took you in hand. Nathan should have been a doctor.”
“He wanted to be,” she murmured after a brief silence, “he so very much wanted to be a doctor.” She paused, and the light-heartedness of just a moment before faded into melancholy. “But that’s another story,” she added, and a wan, strained expression flickered across her face.
I sensed an immediate change of mood, as if her happy reminiscence of their first days together had (perhaps by my comment) become adumbrated by the consciousness of something else—something troubling, hurtful, sinister. And at that very instant, with the dramatic convenience which the incipient novelist in me rather appreciated, her suddenly transformed face seemed almost drowned in the blackest shadow, cast there by one of those fat, oddly tinted clouds that briefly obscured the sun and touched us with an autumnal chill. She gave a quick convulsive shiver and rose, then stood with her back to me, clutching at her bare elbows with fierce hunched intensity, as if the gentle little breeze had pierced to her bones. I could not help—by her dark look and by this gesture—being reminded again of the tormented situation in which I had ambushed them only five nights before, and of how much still remained to be understood about this excruciating connection. There were so many imponderable glints and gleams. Morris Fink, for example. What about that gruesome little puppet show which he had witnessed and described to me—that atrocity which he viewed: Nathan hitting her while she lay on the floor? How did that fit in? How did that square with the fact that on each of these succeeding days when I had seen Sophie and Nathan together the word “enraptured” would have seemed to be a vapid understatement for the nature of their relationship? And how could this man whose tenderness and loving-kindness Sophie recollected with such emotion that from time to time, when speaking to me, her eyes had brimmed with tears—how could this saintly and compassionate fellow have become the living terror I had beheld on Yetta’s doorstep only a short time ago?
I preferred not to dwell upon the matter, which was just as well, for the polychrome cloud went on its way eastward, allowing light to flood around us once again; Sophie smiled, as if the sun’s rays had dispersed her moment of gloom, and hurling a final crust at Tadeusz, said that we should be getting back to Yetta’s. Nathan, she declared with a touch of excitement, had bought a fabulous bottle of Burgundy for their evening dinner, she had to shop at the A & P on Church Avenue for a fine steak to go with it; that done, she added, she would curl up all afternoon and continue her monumental wrestle with “The Bear.” “I would like to meet this Mr. Weel-yam Faulkner,” she said as we strolled back toward the house, “and tell him that he make it very difficult for Polish people when he don’t know how to end a sentence. But oh, Stingo, how that man can write! I feel I’m in Mississippi. Stingo, will you take Nathan and me to the South sometime?”
Sophie’s lively presence receded, then disappeared, from mind as I entered my room and once again with heartstopping distress was smitten by one of those sledgehammer thoughts about Leslie Lapidus. I had been foolish enough to think that on this afternoon, as the fleeting hours ticked away before our rendezvous, my customary discipline and detachment would allow me to continue my usual routine, which is to say, write letters to friends down South or scribble in my notebook or simply loll on my bed and read. I was deep into Crime and Punishment, and although my ambitions as a writer had been laid low by the book’s stupefying range and complexity, I had, for several afternoons now, been forging ahead with admiring wonder, much of my amazement having to do simply with Raskolnikov, whose bedeviled and seedy career in St. Petersburg seemed (except for a murder) so closely analogous to mine in Brooklyn. Its effect on me had indeed been so powerful that I had actually speculated—not idly either, but with a moment’s seriousness, which rather scared me—on the physical and spiritual consequences to myself were I, too, to indulge in a little homicide tinged with metaphysics, plunge a knife, say, into the breast of some innocent old woman like Yetta Zimmerman. The burning vision of the book both repelled me and pulled me back, yet each afternoon its attraction had won out irresistibly. It is all the greater tribute, then, to the way in which Leslie Lapidus had taken possession of my intellect, my very will, that this afternoon the book went unread.
Nor did I write letters or indite in my notebook any of those gnomic lines—ranging from the mordant to the apocalyptic and aping in style the worst of both Cyril Connolly and André Gide—by which I strove to maintain a subsidiary career as diarist. (I long ago destroyed a great deal of these leakages from my youthful psyche, saving only a hundred pages or so with nostalgic value, including the stuff on Leslie and a nine-hundred-word treatise—surprisingly witty for a journal so freighted otherwise with angst and deep thoughts—on the relative merits, apparent friction co-efficients, fragrance and so forth of the various lubricants I had used while practicing the Secret Vice, my hands-down winner being Ivory Flakes well-emulsified in water at body temperature.) No, against all dictates of conscience and the Calvinist work ethic, and despite the fact that I was far from tired, I lay flat on my back in bed, immobilized like one near prostration, bemused in the realization that the fever which I had run for these recent days had caused my muscles to twitch, and that one could actually be taken ill, perhaps seriously so, with venereal ecstasy. I was a recumbent six-foot-long erogenous zone. Each time I thought of Leslie, naked and squirming in my arms as she would be in the coming hours, my heart gave that savage lunge which, as I have said, might be perilous in an older man.
While I lay there in my room’s peppermint-candy glow and the afternoon minutes crept by, my sickness joined company with a kind of half-demented disbelief. Remember, my chastity was all but intact. This enhanced my sense of dwelling in a dream. I was not merely on the verge of getting laid; I was embarking on a voyage to Arcady, to Beulah Land, to the velvet black and starry regions beyond Pleiades. I recalled once more (how many times had I summoned their sound?) the pellucid indecencies Leslie had uttered, and as I did so—the viewfinder of my mind reshaping each crev
ice of her moist and succulent lips, the orthodontically fashioned perfection of the sparkling incisors, even a cunning fleck of foam at the edge of the orifice—it seemed the dizziest pipe dream that this very evening, sometime before the sun should fulfill its oriental circuit and rise again on Sheepshead Bay, that mouth would be—no, I could not let myself think about that slippery-sweet mouth and its impending employments. Just after six o’clock I rolled off the bed and took a shower, then shaved for the third time that day. Finally I dressed in my solitary seersucker suit, extracted a twenty-dollar bill from my Johnson & Johnson treasury, and sallied forth from the room toward my greatest adventure.
Outside in the hallway (in memory, the momentous events of my life have often been accompanied by sharply illuminated little satellite images) Yetta Zimmerman and the poor elephantine Moishe Muskatblit were embroiled in a vigorous argument.
“You call yourself a godly young man, and yet you do this to me?” Yetta was half shouting in a voice filled more with severe pain than real rage. “You get robbed in the subway? Five weeks I’ve given you to pay me the rent—five weeks out of the generosity and goodness of my heart—and now you tell me this old wives’ tale! You think I’m some kind of innocent sweet little faygeleh that I should accept this story? Hoo-ha!” The “Hoo-ha!” was majestic, conveying such contempt that I saw Moishe—fat and sweating in his black ecclesiastical get-up—actually flinch.
“But it’s true!” he insisted. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and his juvenile voice—a falsetto—seemed appropriate to his vast, jellylike physique. “It’s true, my pocket was picked, in the Bergen Street subway station.” He seemed ready to weep. “It was a colored man, a tiny little colored man. Oh, he was so fast! He was gone up the stairs before I could cry out. Oh, Mrs. Zimmerman—”
The “Hoo-ha!” again would have shriveled teakwood. “I should believe such a story? I should believe such a story even from an almost rabbi? Last week you told me—last week you swore to me by all that was holy you would have forty-five dollars on Thursday afternoon. Now you give me this about a pickpocket!” Yetta’s squat bulk was thrust forward in a warlike stance, but once more I felt there was more bluster in her manner than menace. “Thirty years I run this place without evicting nobody. Pride I’ve got in never kicking anyone out except for some weird oysvorf in 1938 I caught dressed up in girls’ panties. Now, after all this, so help me God I’ve gotta evict an almost rabbi!”
“Please!” Moishe squeaked, with an imploring look.
Feeling myself an interloper, I began to squeeze by, or through, their considerable mass, and excused myself with a murmur just as I heard Yetta say, “Well, well! Wherefore art thou going, Romeo?”
I realized it must have been my seersucker suit, freshly laundered and lightly starched, my plastered-down hair and, doubtless above all, my Royall Lyme shaving lotion, which, it suddenly occurred to me, I had slathered on with such abandon that I smelled like a tropical grove. I smiled, said nothing and pressed on, eager to escape both the imbroglio and Yetta’s vaguely lewd attention.
“I’ll bet some lucky girl’s gonna have her dream come true tonight!” she said with a thick chortle.
I flapped an amiable hand in her direction, and with a glance at the cowed and miserable Muskatblit, plunged out into the pleasant June evening. As I hurried down the street toward the subway I could hear above his feeble peeping protests the hoarse gravelly female voice still yakking furiously, yet dying away behind me with an undertone of patient forbearance that told me that Moishe would hardly get thrown out of the Pink Palace. Yetta, I had come to learn, was deep down a good egg, or, in the other idiom, a balbatisheh lady.
However, the intense Jewishness of the little scene—like a recitatif in some Yiddish comic opera—caused me to grow a bit apprehensive about another aspect of my onrushing encounter with Leslie. Rocking north in a pleasantly vacant car of the BMT, I tried distractedly to read a copy of the Brooklyn Eagle, with its parochial concerns, gave up the effort, and as I thought of Leslie it occurred to me that I had never in my life set foot across the doorstep of a Jewish household. What would it be like? I wondered. I suddenly worried whether I was properly clothed, and had a fleeting notion that I should be wearing a hat. No, of course, I assured myself, that was in a synagogue (or was it?), and there quickly flashed across my mind a vision of the homely yellow-brick temple housing the Congregation Rodef Sholem in my hometown in Virginia. Standing diagonally across the street from the Presbyterian church—equally homely in the ghastly mud-colored sandstone-and-slate motif dominating American church architecture of the thirties—where as a child and growing boy I observed my Sunday devotionals, the silent and shuttered synagogue with its frowning cast-iron portals and intaglio Star of David seemed in its intimidating quietude to represent for me all that was isolate, mysterious and even supernatural about Jews and Jewry and their smoky, cabalistic religion.
Strangely perhaps, I was not totally mystified by Jews themselves. Within the outer layers of civil life in that busy Southern town Jews were warmly, thoroughly assimilated and became unexceptional participants: merchants, doctors, lawyers, a spectrum of bourgeois achievement. The deputy (“vice-”) mayor was a Jew; the large local high school took exemplary pride in its winning teams and that rara avis, a hotshot triple-threat Jewish athletic coach. But I saw how Jews seemed to acquire another self or being. It was out of the glare of daylight and the bustle of business, when Jews disappeared into their domestic quarantine and the seclusion of their sinister and Asiatic worship—with its cloudy suspicion of incense and rams’ horns and sacrificial offerings, tambourines and veiled women, lugubrious anthems and keening banshee wails in a dead language—that the trouble began for an eleven-year-old Presbyterian.
I was too young, I suppose, and too ignorant to make the connection between Judaism and Christianity. Likewise, I could not be aware of the grotesque but now obvious paradox: that after Sunday School, as I stood blinking at the somber and ominous tabernacle across the street (my little brain groggy with a stupefyingly boring episode from the Book of Leviticus that had been force-fed me by a maidenly male bank teller named McGehee, whose own ancestors at the time of Moses were worshipping trees on the Isle of Skye and howling at the moon), I had just absorbed a chapter of the ancient, imperishable, ever-unfolding history of the very people whose house of prayer I was gazing upon with deep suspicion, along with a shivery hint of indefinable dread. Dolefully I thought of Abraham and Isaac. God, what unspeakable things went on in that heathen sanctum! On Saturdays, too, when good Gentiles were mowing their lawns or shopping at Sol Nachman’s department store. As a junior Bible scholar, I knew both a great deal about the Hebrews and too little, therefore I still could not truly picture what transpired at the Congregation Rodef Sholem. My childish fancy suggested that they blew a shofar, whose rude untamed notes echoed through a place of abiding gloom where there was a rotting old Ark and a pile of scrolls. Bent kosher women, faces covered, wore hair shirts and loudly sobbed. No stirring hymns were sung, only monotonous chants in which there was repeated with harsh insistency a word sounding like “adenoids.” Spectral and bony phylacteries flapped through the murk like prehistoric birds, and everywhere were the rabbis in skullcaps moaning in a guttural tongue as they went about their savage rites—circumcising goats, burning oxen, disemboweling newborn lambs. What else could a little boy think, after Leviticus? I could not understand how my adored Miriam Bookbinder, or Julie Conn, the volatile high school athletic coach whom everyone idolized, could survive such a Sabbath environment.
Now a decade later I was more or less free of such delusions, but not so completely free that I was not a little apprehensive about what I might find chez Lapidus in my first encounter with a Jewish home. Just before I got off the train at Brooklyn Heights, I found myself speculating on the physical attributes of the place I was about to visit, and—as with the synagogue—made associations with gloom and darkness. This was not the eccentric fantasia of my
childhood. I was scarcely anticipating anything so bleak as the slatternly railroad flats I had read about in certain stories of Jewish city life in the twenties and thirties; I knew that the Lapidus family must be light-years away from the slums as well as from the shtetl. Nonetheless, such is the enduring power of prejudice and preconception that I idly foresaw an abode—as I say—of dim, even funereal oppressiveness. I saw shadowy rooms paneled in dark walnut and furnished with cumbersome pieces in mission oak; on one table would be the menorah, its candles in orderly array but unlit, while nearby on another table would be the Torah, or perhaps the Talmud, opened to a page which had just undergone pious scrutiny by the elder Lapidus. Although scrupulously clean, the dwelling would be musty and unventilated, allowing the odor of frying gefilte fish to waft from the kitchen, where a quick glimpse might reveal a kerchiefed old lady—Leslie’s grandmother—who would grin toothlessly over her skillet but say nothing, speaking no English. In the living room much of the furniture would be in chrome, resembling that of a nursing home. I expected some difficulty conversing with Leslie’s parents—the mother pathetically overweight in the manner of Jewish mothers, bashful, diffident, mostly silent; the father more outgoing and pleasant but able to chat only of his trade—molded plastics—in a voice heavily inflected with the palatal gulps of his mother tongue. We would sip Manischewitz and nibble on halvah, while my becloyed taste buds would desperately yearn for a bottle of Schlitz. Abruptly then, my primary and nagging concern—where, in what precise room, upon what bed or divan in these constrained and puritanical surroundings would Leslie and I fulfill our glorious compact?—was cut off from mind as the train rumbled into the Clark Street–Brooklyn Heights station.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 179
