I was wonderfully high from the beer. The day itself lay nearly prostrate with heat, but a light breeze was blowing from the park and through the fluttering which the breeze made against my windowshade I heard the sound of Beethoven from above. This, of course, was the handiwork of Sophie, home from her half-day’s work on Saturday, who always turned on her phonograph full blast while she took a shower. I realized even as I spun out my Southland fantasy that I was laying it on thick, sounding every bit like the professional Southerner whose attitudes I abhorred nearly as much as those of the snotty New Yorker gripped by that reflexive liberalism and animosity toward the South which had given me such a pain in the ass, but it didn’t matter; I was exhilarated after a morning of especially fruitful work, and the spell of the South (whose sights and sounds I had so painfully set down, spilling quarts of my heart’s blood) was upon me like a minor ecstasy, or a major heartache. I had, of course, experienced this surge of bittersweet time-sorrow often before—most recently when in a seizure considerably less sincere my cornpone blandishments had so notably failed to work their sorcery on Leslie Lapidus—but today the mood seemed especially fragile, quivering, poignant, translucent; I felt that at any moment I might dissolve into unseemly albeit magnificently genuine tears. The lovely adagio from the Fourth Symphony floated down, merging like the serene, steadfast throb of a human pulse with my exalted mood.
“I’m with you, old pal,” I heard Nathan say from his chair behind me. “You know, it’s time I saw the South. Something you said early this summer—it seems so long ago—something you said about the South has stuck with me. Or I guess I should say it has more to do with the North and the South. We were having one of the arguments we used to have, and I remember you said something to the effect that at least Southerners have ventured North, have come to see what the North is like, while very few Northerners have really ever troubled themselves to travel to the South, to look at the lay of the land down there. I remember your saying how smug Northerners appeared to be in their willful and self-righteous ignorance. You said it was intellectual arrogance. Those were the words you used—they seemed awfully strong at the time—but I later began to think about it, began to see that you may be right.” He paused for a moment, then with real passion said, “I’ll confess to that ignorance. How can I really have hated a place I have never seen or known? I’m with you. We’ll take that trip!”
“Bless you, Nathan,” I replied, glowing with affection and Rheingold.
Beer in hand, I had edged into the bathroom to take a leak. I was a little drunker than I had realized. I peed all over the seat. Over the plashing stream I heard Nathan’s voice: “I’m due a vacation from the lab in mid-October and by that time the way you’re going you should have a big hunk of your book done. You’ll probably need a little breathing spell. Why don’t we plan for then? Sophie hasn’t had a vacation from that quack during the entire time she’s worked for him, so she’s due a couple of weeks too. I can borrow my brother’s car, the convertible. He won’t need it, he’s bought a new Oldsmobile. We’ll drive down to Washington...” Even as he spoke my gaze rested upon the medicine chest—that depository which had seemed so secure until my recent robbery. Who had been the perpetrator, I wondered, now that Morris Fink was absolved of the crime? Some Flatbush prowler, thieves were always around. It no longer really mattered and I sensed that my earlier rage and chagrin were now supplanted by an odd, complex unrest about the purloined cash, which, after all, had been the proceeds of the sale of a human being. Artiste! My grandmother’s chattel, source of my own salvation. It was the slave boy Artiste who had provided me with the wherewithal for much of this summer’s sojourn in Brooklyn; by the posthumous sacrifice of his flesh and hide he had done a great deal to keep me afloat during the early stages of my book, so perhaps it was divine justice that Artiste would support me no longer. My survival would no more be assured through funds tainted with guilt across the span of a century. I was glad in a way to get shut of such blood money, to get rid of slavery.
Yet how could I ever get rid of slavery? A lump rose in my gorge, I whispered the word aloud, “Slavery!” There was dwelling somewhere in the inward part of my mind a compulsion to write about slavery, to make slavery give up its most deeply buried and tormented secrets, which was every bit as necessary as the compulsion that drove me to write, as I had been writing today, about the inheritors of that institution who now in the 1940s floundered amid the insane apartheid of Tidewater Virginia—my beloved and bedeviled bourgeois New South family whose every move and gesture, I had begun to realize, were played out in the presence of a vast, brooding company of black witnesses, all sprung from the loins of bondage. And were not all of us, white and Negro, still enslaved? I knew that in the fever of my mind and in the most unquiet regions of my heart I would be shackled by slavery as long as I remained a writer. Then suddenly, through a pleasant, lazy, slightly intoxicated mental ramble which led from Artiste to my father to the vision of a white-robed Negro baptism in the muddy river James to my father again, snoring in the Hotel McAlpin—suddenly I thought of Nat Turner, and was riven by a pain of nostalgia so intense that it was like being impaled upon a spear. I removed myself from the bathroom with a lurch and with a sound on my lips that, a little too loudly, startled Nathan with its incoherent urgency.
“Nat Turner!” I said.
“Nat Turner?” Nathan replied with a puzzled look. “Who in hell is Nat Turner?”
“Nat Turner,” I said, “was a Negro slave who in the year 1831 killed about sixty white people—none of them, I might add, Jewish boys. He lived not far from my hometown on the James River. My father’s farm is right in the middle of the country where he led this bloody revolt of his.” And then I began to tell Nathan of the little I knew about this prodigious black figure, whose life and deeds were shrouded in such mystery that his very existence was scarcely remembered by the people of that backwater region, much less the rest of the world. As I spoke, Sophie entered the room, looking scrubbed and fresh and pink and utterly beautiful, and seated herself on the arm of Nathan’s chair. She began to listen too, her face sweet and absorbed as she negligently stroked his shoulder. But I was soon finished, for I realized that there was very little I could tell about this man; he had appeared out of the mists of history to commit his gigantic deed in one blinding cataclysmic explosion, then faded as enigmatically as he had come, leaving no explanation for himself, no identity, no after-image, nothing but his name. He had to be discovered anew, and that afternoon, trying to explain him to Nathan and Sophie in my half-drunken excitement and enthusiasm, I realized for the first time that I would have to write about him and make him mine, and re-create him for the world.
“Fantastic!” I heard myself cry in beery joy. “You know something, Nathan, I just began to see. I’m going to make a book out of that slave. And the timing is absolutely perfect for our trip. I’ll be at a point in this novel where I can feel free to break off—I’ll have a whole solid chunk of it down. And so when we get down to Southampton we can ride all over Nat Turner country, talk to people, look at all the old houses. I’ll be able to soak up a lot of the atmosphere and also make a lot of notes, collect information. It’ll be my next book, a novel about old Nat. Meanwhile, you and Sophie will be adding something very valuable to your education. It’ll be one of the most fascinating parts of our trip...”
Nathan put his arm around Sophie and gave her an enormous squeeze. “Stingo,” he said, “I can’t wait. We’ll be heading in October for Dixieland.” Then he glanced up into Sophie’s face. The look of love they exchanged—the merest instant of eyes meeting then melting together, but marvelously intense—was so embarrassingly intimate that I turned briefly away. “Shall I tell him?” he said to Sophie.
“Why not?” she replied. “Stingo’s our best friend, isn’t he?”
“And also our best man, I hope. We’re going to get married in October!” he said gaily. “So this trip will also be our honeymoon.”
�
��God Almighty!” I yelled. “Congratulations!” And I strode over to the chair and kissed them both—Sophie next to her ear, where I was stung by a fragrance of gardenia, and Nathan on his noble blade of a nose. “That’s perfectly wonderful,” I murmured, and I meant it, having totally forgotten how in the recent past such ecstatic moments with their premonitions of even greater delight had almost always been a brightness that blinded the eyes to onrushing disaster.
It must have been ten days or so after this, during the last week of September, that I received a telephone call from Nathan’s brother, Larry. I was surprised when one morning Morris Fink summoned me to the greasy pay phone in the hallway—surprised to get any call at all, but especially from a person whom I had so often heard about but never met. The voice was warm and likable—it sounded almost the same as Nathan’s with its distinctly Brooklyn resonance—and was casual enough at first but then took on a slight edge of insistence when Larry inquired whether it was possible for us to arrange a meeting, the sooner the better. He said he would prefer not to come to Mrs. Zimmerman’s, and therefore would I mind paying him a visit at his home in Forest Hills. He added that I must be aware that all this had to do with Nathan—it was urgent. Without hesitation I said that I would be glad to see him, and we arranged to meet at his place late in the afternoon.
I got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of subway tunnels that connects the counties of Kings and Queens, took a wrong bus and found myself in the desolate sprawl of Jamaica, and thus was well over an hour late; but Larry greeted me with enormous courtesy and friendliness. He met me at the door of a large and comfortable apartment in what I took to be a rather fashionable neighborhood. I had almost never encountered anyone for whom I felt such an immediate and positive attraction. He was a bit shorter and distinctly more stocky and fleshed out than Nathan, and of course he was older, resembling his brother in an arresting way; yet the difference between the two was quickly apparent, for where Nathan was all nervous energy, volatile, unpredictable, Larry was calm and soft-spoken, almost phlegmatic, with a reassuring manner which may have been part of his doctor’s make-up but which I really think was due to some essential solidity or decency of character. He put me quickly at ease when I tried to apologize for my lateness, and offered me a bottle of Molson’s Canadian ale in the most ingratiating manner by saying, “Nathan tells me that you are a connoisseur of malt beverages.” And as we sat down on chairs by a spacious open window overlooking a complex of pleasant ivy-covered Tudor buildings, his words helped make me feel that we were already well-acquainted.
“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?
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 216
