The voice broke in with its ingratiating molasses pokiness and warmth, still an uncanny replica of the speech of my Carolina forebears, lilting, lulling: “I’m sho’ lookin’ forward to that trip with you an’ Miz Sophie. We gonna have the time of our lives, ain’t we, ol’ buddy?”
“It’s going to be the best trip ever—” I began.
“We’ll have a lot of free time, too, won’t we?” he said.
“Sure, we’ll have a lot of free time,” I replied, not knowing quite what he meant. “All the time in the world, to do anything we want. It’s still warm in October down there. Swim. Fish. Sail a boat on Mobile Bay.”
“That’s what I want,” he drawled, “lots of free time. What I mean is, three people, they travel around a lot together, well, even when they are the best of friends, it might be a little sticky bein’ together every single minute. So I’d have free time to go off by myself every now an’ then, wouldn’t I? Just for an hour or two, maybe, down in Birmingham or Baton Rouge or someplace like that.” He paused and I heard a rich melodious chuckle. “An’ that would give you free time too, wouldn’t it? You might even have enough free time to get you a little nooky. A growin’ Southern boy’s got to have his poontang, don’t he?”
I began to laugh a trifle nervously, struck by the fact that in this weird conversation with its desperate undertone, at least on my part, we should already have foundered on the shoals of sex. But I willingly rose to Nathan’s bait, quite unaware of the savage hook he had fashioned for my precipitate capture. “Well, Nathan,” I said, “I do expect that here and there I’ll run into some good, ready stuff. Southern girls,” I added, thinking grimly of Mary Alice Grimball, “are tough to penetrate, if you’ll excuse the phrase, but once they decide to put out, they’re awfully sweet in the sack—”
“No, buddy,” he put in suddenly, “I don’t mean Southern nooky! What I mean is Polack nooky! What I mean is that when ol’ Nathan goes off to see Mr. Jeff Davis’s White House or the ol’ plantation where Scarlett O’Hara whupped all those niggers with her ridin’ crop—why, there’s ol’ Stingo back at the Green Magnolia Motel, and guess what he’s doin’? Just guess! Guess what ol’ Stingo’s up to with his best friend’s wife! Why, Stingo and her are in bed and he has actually mounted that tender willing little Polish piece an’ they jus’ fuckin’ their fool heads off! Hee hee!”
As he said these words I was aware that Sophie had drawn near, hovering at my elbow, murmuring something I could not comprehend—the incomprehensibility being partly due to the blood pounding at a hot gallop in my ears and perhaps also to the fact that, distracted and horrified, I could pay little attention to anything save for the incredible jellylike weakness in my knees and my fingers, which had begun to twitch out of control. “Nathan!” I said in a choked voice. “Good God—”
And then his voice, transmuted back into what I had always conceived as Educated High Brooklyn, became a snarl of such ferocity that even the myriad intervening and humming electronic synapses could not filter out the force of its crazed but human rage. “You unspeakable creep! You wretched swine! God damn you to hell forever for betraying me behind my back, you whom I trusted like the best friend I ever had! And that shit-eating grin of yours day after day cool as a cucumber, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it, when you gave me a piece of your manuscript to read—‘ah gee, Nathan, thank you so much—’ when not fifteen minutes earlier you’d been humping away in bed with the woman I was going to marry, I say was going to, past tense, because I’d burn in hell before I’d marry a two-timing Polack who’d spread her legs for a sneaky Southern shitass betraying me like...”
I removed the receiver from my ear and turned to Sophie, who, with mouth agape, had clearly divined what it was that Nathan had been raging about. “Oh God, Stingo,” I heard her whisper, “I didn’t want you to know that he kept saying it was you that I was...”
I listened again, in impotence and anguish: “I’m coming to get you both.” Then there was a moment’s silence, resonant, baffling. And I heard a metallic click. But I realized the line was not dead.
“Nathan,” I said. “Please! Where are you?”
“Not far away, old pal. In fact, I’m right around the corner. And I’m coming to get you treacherous scum. And then you know what I’m going to do? Do you know what I’m going to do to you two deceitful, unspeakable pigs? Listen—”
There was an explosion in my ear. Too diminished by the distance or by whatever in a phone mercifully deamplifies noise and prevents it from destroying human hearing, the impact of the gunshot stunned rather than hurt me yet nonetheless left a prolonged and desolate buzzing against my eardrum like the swarming of a thousand bees. I will never know whether Nathan fired that shot into the very mouth of the telephone he was holding, or into the air, or against some forlorn, anonymous wall, but it sounded close enough for him to be, as he had said, right around the corner, and I dropped the receiver in panic and, turning, clutched for Sophie’s hand. I had not heard a shot fired since the war, and I’m almost certain that I thought I would never hear another shot again. I pity my blind innocence. Now, after the passing of time in this bloody century, whenever there has occurred any of those unimaginable deeds of violence that have plundered our souls, my memory has turned back to Nathan—the poor lunatic whom I loved, high on drugs and with a smoking barrel in some nameless room or phone booth—and his image has always seemed to foreshadow these wretched unending years of madness, illusion, error, dream and strife. But at that moment I felt only unutterable fear. I looked at Sophie, and she looked at me, and we fled.
Chapter Fifteen
THE NEXT MORNING the Pennsylvania train that Sophie and I were riding to Washington, D.C., on our way down to Virginia, suffered a power failure and stalled on the trestle opposite the Wheatena factory in Rahway, New Jersey. During this interruption in our trip—a stop which lasted only fifteen minutes or so—I subsided into a remarkable tranquillity and found myself taking hopeful stock of the future. It still amazes me that I was able to maintain this calm, this almost elegant repose, after our headlong escape from Nathan and the fretful, sleepless night Sophie and I spent in the bowels of Penn Station. My eyes were gritty with fatigue and a part of my mind still dwelt achingly on the catastrophe we had barely avoided. As time had worn on that night it seemed more and more probable to both Sophie and me that Nathan had not been in our vicinity when he made that telephone call; nonetheless his merciless threat had sent us running madly from the Pink Palace with only one large suitcase each to get us down to the farm in Southampton County. We agreed that we would worry about the rest of our belongings later. From that moment on we had both been possessed—and in a sense united—by a single-minded and terrible urge: to flee Nathan and get as far away from him as we could.
Even so, the spell of enervated composure which finally came over me on the train would scarcely have been possible had it not been for the first of two telephone calls I was finally able to complete from the station. This was to Larry, who understood immediately the desperate nature of his brother’s crisis and told me that he would leave Toronto without delay and come down and cope with Nathan in the best way he could. We wished each other luck and said we would keep in touch. So at least I felt I had discharged some final responsibility toward Nathan and had not exactly abandoned him in my scramble to get away; after all, I had been running for my life. The other call was to my father; he of course welcomed with joy my announcement that Sophie and I were on our way south. “You’ve made a splendid decision!” I heard him shout over the distant miles, with obvious emotion. “Leaving that no-good world!”
And so, sitting high above Rahway in the crowded coach with Sophie dozing beside me, munching on a stale Danish pastry bought from the candy butcher along with a lukewarm carton of milk, I began to regard the unfolding years ahead with equanimity and affection. Now that Nathan and Brooklyn were behind me, I was about to turn the page on a new chapter in my life. For one thing, I calcul
ated that my book, which would be a longish one, was nearly one-third completed. By chance the work I had done on it at Jack Brown’s house had brought me to a congenial way station in the narrative, a place where I felt it would be easy to pick up the loose ends once I got settled with Sophie down on the farm. After a week or so of adjusting to our new rural surroundings—getting to know the Negro help, stocking the larder, meeting the neighbors, learning to run the old beat-up truck and tractor which my father had told me came with the place—I would be in a fine way to resume advancing the story, and with honest application I might be lucky enough to have the whole thing wrapped up and ready to hawk to a publisher by the end of 1948.
I looked down at Sophie as I thought these buoyant thoughts. She was fast asleep, her tousled blond head lay against my shoulder, and I very gently surrounded her with my arm, lightly touching her hair with my lips as I did so. A vagrant pang of memory stabbed me but I thrust the ache aside; certainly I could not be a homosexual, could I, feeling for this creature such abiding, heartbreaking desire? We would of course have to get married, once established in Virginia; the ethos of the time and place would certainly permit no casual cohabitation. But despite the nagging problems, which included eradicating the memory of Nathan and the difference in our ages, I had the feeling that Sophie would be willing, and I resolved to nibble around the edges of this proposition with her once she woke up. She stirred and murmured something in her slumber, looking even in her haggard exhaustion so lovely that I wanted to weep. My God, I thought, this woman is soon likely to be my wife.
The train gave a lurch, moved forward, faltered, stopped again, and a low concerted groan went through the car. A sailor standing above me in the aisle swilled at a can of beer. A baby began to squall with hellish abandon behind me, and it occurred to me that in public conveyances fate inevitably positioned the single screaming infant in the seat nearest my own. I hugged Sophie softly and thought of my book; a thrill of pride and contentment went through me when I considered the honest workmanship I had so far put into the story, making its predestined way with grace and beauty toward the blazing denouement which remained to be set down but which I had already foretokened in my mind a thousand times: the tormented, alienated girl going to her lonely death on the indifferent summertime streets of the city I had just left behind. I had a moment of gloom: Would I be able to summon the passion, the insight to portray this young suicide? Could I make it all seem real? I was sorely bothered by the approaching struggle of imagining the girl’s ordeal. Nonetheless I felt so serenely secure in the integrity of this novel that I had already fashioned for it an appropriately melancholy title: Inheritance of Night. This from the Requiescat of Matthew Arnold, an elegy for a woman’s spirit, with its concluding line: “Tonight it doth inherit the vasty hall of Death.” How could a book like this fail to capture the souls of thousands of readers? Gazing out at the grime-encrusted façade of the Wheatena factory—hulking, homely, its blue industrial windows reflecting the morning light—I shivered with happiness and again with pride at the sheer quality of what I had put into my book by dint of so much solitary work and perspiration and, yes, even occasional freshets of grief; and thinking once more of the as yet unwritten climax, I allowed myself to fantasize a line from the review of a dazzled critic of 1949 or 1950: “The most powerful passage of female interior monologue since Molly Bloom’s.” What folly! I thought. What conceit!
Sophie slept. Tenderly I wondered how many days and nights she would be drowsing next to me in the coming years. I speculated on our matrimonial bed at the farm, thought of its size and shape, wondered if its mattress was constructed with sufficient amplitude, bounce and resilience to accommodate the industrious venery it would certainly receive. I thought of our children, the many young towheads skipping around the farm like little Polish buttercups and thistles, and my merry paternal commands: “Time to milk the cow, Jerzy!” “Wanda, feed the chickens!” “Tadeusz! Stefania! Close up the barn!” I thought of the farm itself, which I had not seen outside of my father’s snapshots, tried to visualize it as the abode of a prominent literary figure. Like Faulkner’s Mississippi home, “Rowan Oak,” it would have to be given a name, one possibly appropriate to the peanut crop that provided its reason for being. “Goober Haven” was far and away too facetious, and I abandoned all other changes on the nut motif, playing instead with names more tony, stately, dignified: “Five Elms” perhaps (I hoped the farm had five elms, or even one) or “Rosewood,” or “Great Fields,” or “Sophia,” in tribute to my beloved dame. In my mind’s prism the years like blue hills rolled peacefully away toward the horizon of the far future. Inheritance of Night a remarkable success, gaining laurels rarely shed upon the work of a writer so young. A short novel then, also acclaimed, having to do with my wartime experiences—a taut, searing book eviscerating the military in a tragicomedy of the absurd. Meanwhile, Sophie and I living on the modest plantation in dignified seclusion, my reputation growing, the author himself being increasingly importuned by the media but steadfastly refusing all interviews. “I just farm peanuts,” says he, going about his work. At age thirty or thereabouts another masterpiece, These Blazing Leaves, the chronicle of that tragic Negro firebrand Nat Turner.
The train lurched forward, began to churn with smooth and oily precision as it gained momentum, and my vision evaporated in an effervescent blur against the grimy, receding walls of Rahway.
Sophie awoke abruptly, with a little cry. I glanced down at her. She seemed a bit feverish; her brow and cheeks were flushed, and a fragile, dewy mustache of perspiration hovered above her lip. “Where are we, Stingo?” she said.
“Somewhere in New Jersey,” I replied.
“How long does it take, this trip to Washington?” she asked.
“Oh, between three and four hours,” I said.
“And then to the farm?”
“I don’t know exactly. We’ll get a train to Richmond, then a bus down to Southampton. It’ll be quite a few more hours. It’s practically in North Carolina. That’s why I think we’ve got to spend the night in Washington and then head down to the farm tomorrow morning. We could stop in Richmond for the night, I guess, but this way you’ll get to see a little bit of Washington.”
“Okay, Stingo,” she said, taking my hand. “I’ll do whatever you say.” After a silence she said, “Stingo, would you go get me some water?”
“Sure.” I pressed down the aisle crowded with people, mostly servicemen, and near the vestibule found the fountain, where I trickled warm unsavory-looking water into a paper cup. When I returned, still airily elated by my fanciful pipe dreams, my spirits sank like pig iron at the sight of Sophie clutching a full pint bottle of Four Roses which she had plucked from her suitcase.
“Sophie,” I said gently, “for God’s sake, it’s morning still. You haven’t even had breakfast. You’re going to get cirrhosis of the liver.”
“That’s all right,” she said, sloshing whiskey into the cup. “I had a doughnut at the station. And a Seven-Up.”
I groaned softly, aware from past experience that there was no way of dealing with this problem short of complicating matters and creating a scene. The most I could hope for would be to catch her off guard and swipe the bottle, as I had done once or twice before. I sank back in my seat. The train sped across New Jersey’s satanic industrial barrens, the clickety-clack momentum hurling us past squalid slums, sheet-metal sheds, goofy drive-ins with whirling signs, warehouses, bowling alleys built like crematoriums, crematoriums built like roller rinks, swamps of green chemical slime, parking lots, barbarous oil refineries with their spindly upright nozzles ejaculating flame and mustard-yellow fumes. What would Thomas Jefferson have thought, viewing this? I mused. Sophie, jittery, restless, alternately gazed out at this landscape and poured whiskey into her cup, finally turning to me to say, “Stingo, does this train stop anywhere between here and Washington?”
“Only for a minute or two to take on passengers or let them off. Why?”
“I want to make a telephone call.”
“Who to?”
“I want to call and find out about Nathan. I want to see if he’s all right.”
Ogreish gloom encompassed me in recapitulation of the agony of the night before. I took Sophie’s arm and squeezed it hard, too hard; she winced. “Sophie,” I said, “listen. Listen to me. That part is over. There is nothing you can do. Can’t you realize that he actually was on the point of killing us both? Larry will come down from Toronto and locate Nathan and—well, deal with him. After all, he’s his brother, his closest relative. Nathan is insane, Sophie! He’s got to be... institutionalized.”
She had begun to weep. The tears spilled down around her fingers, which suddenly looked very thin, pink and emaciated as she clutched her cup. And once again I was conscious of that pitiless blue toothbite of a tattoo on her forearm. “I just don’t know how I’m going to face things, I mean, without him.” She paused, sobbing. “I could call Larry.”
“You couldn’t reach him now,” I insisted, “he must be on a train somewhere near Buffalo.”
“Then I could call Morris Fink. He might be able to tell me if Nathan came back to the house. Sometimes, you know, he would do that when he was on a high. He would come back and take some Nembutal and sleep it off. Then when he woke up he would be all right. Or almost all right. Morris would know if he did that this time.” She blew her nose, continuing to make little hiccupy sobs.
“Oh, Sophie, Sophie,” I whispered, wanting to say but unable to say, “It’s all over.”
Thundering into the station in Philadelphia, the train screeched and shuddered to a stop amid the sunless cavern, touching me with a pang of nostalgia I could scarcely have foreseen. In the window I caught a glimpse of my reflected face, pale from too much indoor literary endeavor, and behind that face I thought for an instant I saw a younger replica—my little-boy self over ten years before. I laughed out loud at the remembrance, and suddenly invigorated and inspired, resolved both to distract Sophie from her gathering disquiet and to cheer her up, or try to.
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