As she squirmed on his lap he nibbled at her ear and squeezed her waist, causing her adoring face to glow so visibly that I could have sworn he had twisted some kind of knob. “I can’t keep my hands off you-u-u,” he hummed. Like others, I am embarrassed by unprivate displays of affection—or of hostility, for that matter—especially when I am the solitary onlooker. I took a large swallow of beer and averted my eyes; they of course lit upon the outsized bed with its coverlet of luscious apricot where my new friends had transacted most of these goings-on, and which had been the monstrous engine of so much of my recent discomfort. Maybe my renewed outbreak of coughing betrayed me, or I suspect Sophie sensed my embarrassment; at any rate, she leaped up from Nathan’s lap, saying, “Enough! Enough for you, Nathan Landau. No more kisses.”
“Come on,” he complained, “one more.”
“No more,” she said sweetly but firmly. “We’re going to have the beer and a little fromage and then we’re all going to get on the subway train and go have lunch at Coney Island.”
“You’re a cheater,” he said in a kidding voice. “You’re a tease. You’re worse than any little yenta that ever came out of Brooklyn.” He turned and regarded me with mock gravity. “What do you think of that, Stingo? Here I am pushing thirty years old. I fall crazy in love with a Polish shiksa and she keeps her sweet treasure all locked up as tightly as little Shirley Mirmelstein I tried to make out with for five whole years. What do you think of that?” Again the sly wink.
“Bad news,” I improvised in a jocular tone. “It’s a form of sadism.” Although I’m certain I kept my composure, I was really vastly surprised at this revelation: Sophie was not Jewish! I could not really have cared less one way or another, but I was still surprised, and there was something vaguely negative and self-preoccupied in my reaction. Like Gulliver among the Hounyhnhnms, I had rather thought myself a unique figure in this huge Semitic arrondissement and was simply taken aback that Yetta’s house should shelter another Gentile. So Sophie was a shiksa. Well, hush my mouth, I thought in mild wonder.
Sophie set before us a plate containing squares of toast upon which she had melted little sunbursts of golden Cheddar-like cheese. With the beer, they tasted particularly delicious. I began to warm to the convivial, gently alcoholic mood of our tiny gathering as does a hound dog who slinks out from chill, comfortless shadows into the heat of the midday sun.
“When I first met this one here,” Nathan said as she sat down on the rug beside his chair and contentedly leaned against his leg, “she was a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. And that was a whole year and a half after the Russians liberated that camp she was in. How much was it you weighed, sweetie?”
“Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight kilos.”
“Yeah, about eighty-five pounds. Can you imagine? She was a wraith.”
“How much do you weigh now, Sophie?” I asked.
“Just fifty.”
“One hundred and ten pounds,” Nathan translated, “which still isn’t enough for her frame and height. She should weigh about one-seventeen, but she’s getting there—she’s getting there. We’ll make a nice big milk-fed American girl out of her in no time.” Idly, affectionately he fingered the butter-yellow strands of hair that curled out from beneath the rim of her beret. “But, boy, was she a wreck when I first got hold of her. Here, drink some beer, sweetie. It’ll help make you fat.”
“I was a real wreck,” Sophie put in, her tone affectingly light-hearted. “I looked like an old witch—I mean, you know, the thing that chases birds away. The scarecrow? I didn’t have hardly any hair and my legs ached. I had the scorbut—”
“The scurvy,” Nathan interjected, “she means she’d had the scurvy, which was cured as soon as the Russians took over—”
“Le scorbut—scurvy I mean—I had. I lose my teeth! And typhus. And scarlet fever. And anemia. All of them. I was a real wreck.” She uttered the litany of diseases with no self-pity yet with a certain childish earnestness, as if she were reciting the names of some pet animals. “But then I met Nathan and he taked care of me.”
“Theoretically she was saved as soon as the camp was liberated,” he explained. “That is, she wasn’t going to die. But then she was in a displaced persons’ camp for a long time. And there were thousands of people there, tens of thousands, and they just didn’t have the medical facilities to take care of all the damage that the Nazis had done to so many bodies. So then last year, when she arrived over here in America, she still had a quite serious, I mean a really serious, case of anemia. I could tell.”
“How could you tell?” I asked, with honest interest in his expertise.
Nathan explained, briefly, articulately, and with a straightforward modesty that I found winning. Not that he was a physician, he said. He was, rather, a graduate in science from Harvard, with a master’s degree in cellular and developmental biology. It had been his achievement in this field of study which had led him to be hired as a researcher at Pfizer, a Brooklyn-based firm and one of the largest pharmaceutical houses in the nation. So much, then, for the background. He claimed no intricate or extensive medical knowledge, and had no use for the lay habit of venturing amateur diagnoses of illness; his training had, however, made him more than ordinarily enlightened about the chemical vagaries and ailments of the human body, and so the moment he first laid eyes on Sophie (“this sweetie,” he murmured with enormous concern and gentleness, twisting the lock of her hair) he guessed, with dead accuracy as it turned out, that her ravaged appearance was the result of a deficiency anemia.
“I took her to a doctor, a friend of my brother’s, who teaches at Columbia Presbyterian. He does work in nutrition diseases.” A proud note, not at all unattractive in the sense it conveyed of quiet authority, stole into Nathan’s voice. “He said I was right on target. A critical deficiency of iron. We put the little sweetie here on massive doses of ferrous sulfate and she began to bloom like a rose.” He paused and looked down at her. “A rose. A rose. A beautiful fucking rose.” He lightly ran his fingers over his lips and transferred his fingertips to her brow, anointing it with his kiss. “God, you’re something,” he whispered, “you’re the greatest.”
She gazed up at him. She looked incredibly beautiful but somehow tired and drawn. I thought of the previous night’s orgy of sorrow. She lightly stroked the blue-veined surface of his wrist. “Thank you, Monsieur Senior Researcher at Charles Pfizer Company,” she said. For some reason, I could not help but think: Jesus Christ, Sophie honey, we’ve got to find you a dialogue coach. “And thank you for making me to bloom like a rose,” she added after a moment.
All at once I became aware of the way in which Sophie echoed so much of Nathan’s diction. Indeed, he was her dialogue coach, a fact which became more directly evident now as I heard him begin to correct her in detail, like an exceedingly meticulous, very patient instructor at a Berlitz school. “Not ‘to bloom,’” he explained, “just ‘bloom.’ You’re so good, it’s about time you were perfect. You must begin to learn just when and where to add the preposition ‘to’ to the infinitive verb, and when to leave it out. And it’s tough, you see, because in English there’s no hard, fast rule. You have to use your instinct.”
“Instinct?” she said.
“You have to use your ear, so that it finally becomes instinct. Let me give you an example. You could say ‘causing me to bloom like a rose’ but not ‘making me to bloom.’ There’s no rule about this, understand. It’s just one of those odd little tricks of the language which you’ll pick up in time.” He stroked her earlobe. “With that pretty ear of yours.”
“Such a language!” she groaned, and in mock pain clutched her brow. “Too many words. I mean just the words for vélocité. I mean ‘fast.’ ‘Rapid.’ ‘Quick.’ All the same thing! A scandal!”
“ ‘Swift,’ ” I added.
“How about ‘speedy’?” Nathan said.
“ ‘Hasty,’ ” I went on.
“And ‘fleet,’” Nathan said, “though that’s a bit
fancy.”
“ ‘Snappy’!” I said.
“Stop it!” Sophie said, laughing. “Too much! Too many words, this English. In French it is so simple, you just say ‘vite.’ ”
“How about some more beer?” Nathan asked me. “We’ll finish off this other quart and then go down to Coney Island and hit the beach.”
I noticed that Nathan drank next to nothing himself, but was almost embarrassingly generous with the Budweiser, keeping my glass topped off with unceasing attention. As for myself, in that brief time I had begun to achieve a benign, tingling high so surprisingly intense that I became a little uneasy trying to manage my own euphoria. It was an exaltation really, lofty as the summer sun; I felt buoyed up by fraternal arms holding me in a snug, loving, compassionate embrace. Part of what worked on me was, to be sure, only the coarse clutch of alcohol. The rest stemmed from all of those mingled elements comprising what, in that era so heavily burdened by the idiom of psychoanalysis, I had come to recognize as the gestalt: the blissful temper of the sunny June day, the ecstatic pomp of Mr. Handel’s riverborne jam session, and this festive little room whose open windows admitted a fragrance of spring blossoms which pierced me with that sense of ineffable promise and certitude I don’t recall having felt more than once or twice after the age of twenty-two—or let us say twenty-five—when the ambitious career I had cut out for myself seemed so often to be the consequence of pitiable lunacy.
Above all, however, my joy flowed out from some source I had not known since I had come to New York months before, and thought I had abandoned forever—fellowship, familiarity, sweet times among friends. The brittle aloofness with which I had so willfully armored myself I felt crumbling away utterly. How wonderful it was, I thought, to happen upon Sophie and Nathan—these warm and bright and lively new companions—and the urge I had to reach out and hug both of them close to me was (for the moment at least, despite my desperate crush on Sophie) freighted with the mellowest brotherhood, cleanly, practically devoid of carnal accents. Old Stingo, I murmured, grinning foolishly at Sophie but toasting myself with the foaming Bud, you’ve come back to the land of the living. “Salut, Stingo!” said Sophie, tipping in return the glass of beer which Nathan had pressed on her, and the grave and delectable smile she bestowed on me, bright teeth shining amid a scrubbed happy face still bruised with the shadows of deprivation, touched me so deeply that I made an involuntary, choking sound of contentment. I felt close to total salvation.
Yet beneath my grand mood I was able to sense that there was something wrong. The terrible scene between Sophie and Nathan the night before should have been warning enough to me that our chummy little get-together, with its laughter and its ease and its gentle intimacy, was scarcely true of the status quo as it existed between them. But I am a person who is too often weakly misguided by the external masquerade, quick to trust in such notions as that the ghastly blow-up I had witnessed was a lamentable but rare aberration in a lovers’ connection whose prevailing tone was really hearts and flowers. I suppose the fact of the matter is that deep down I so hungered for friendship—was so infatuated with Sophie, and attracted with such perverse fascination to this dynamic, vaguely outlandish, wickedly compelling young man who was her inamorato—that I dared not regard their relationship in anything but the rosiest light. Even so, as I say, I could feel something distinctly out of joint. Beneath all the jollity, the tenderness, the solicitude, I sensed a disturbing tension in the room. I don’t mean that the tension at that moment directly involved the two lovers. But there was tension, an unnerving strain, and most of it seemed to emanate from Nathan. He had become distracted, restless, and he got up and fiddled with the phonograph records, replaced the Handel with Vivaldi again, in obvious turmoil gulped a glass of water, sat down and drummed his fingers against his pants leg in rhythm to the celebrant horns.
Then swiftly he turned to me, peering at me searchingly with his troubled and gloomy eyes, and said, “Just an old briar-hopper, ain’t you?” After a pause and with a touch of the bogus drawl he had baited me with before, he added, “You know, you Confederate types interest me. You-all”—and here he bore down on the “all”—“you-all interest me very, very much.”
I began to do, or undergo, or experience what I believe is known as a slow burn. This Nathan was incredible! How could he be so clumsy, so unfeeling—such a creep? My euphoric haze evaporated like thousands of tiny soap bubbles all at once. This swine! I thought. He had actually trapped me! How otherwise to explain this sly change in mood, unless it was to try to edge me into a corner? It was either clumsiness or craft: there was no other way to fathom such words, after I had so emphatically and so recently made it a condition of our amity—if such it might be called—that he would lay off his heavy business about the South. Once more indignation rose like a regurgitated bone in my gorge, though I made a last attempt to be patient. I turned up the butane under my Tidewater accent and said, “Why, Nathan ole hoss, you Brooklyn folks interest us boys down home, too.”
This had a distinctly adverse effect on Nathan. He was not only unamused, his eyes flashed warfare; he glowered at me with implacable mistrust, and for an instant I could have sworn I saw in those shining pupils the freak, the redneck, the alien he knew me to be.
“Oh, fuck it,” I said, starting to rise to my feet. “I’ll just be going—”
But before I could set down my glass and get up he had clutched me by the wrist. It was not a rough or painful grasp, but he bore down strongly nonetheless, and insistently, and his grip held me fast in the chair. There was something desperately importunate in that grip which chilled me.
“It’s hardly a joking matter,” he said. His voice, though restrained, was, I felt, charged with turbulent emotion. Then his next words, spoken with deliberate, almost comical slowness, were like an incantation. “Bobby... Weed... Bobby Weed! Do you think Bobby Weed is worthy of nothing more than your attempt... at... humor?”
“It wasn’t I who started that cotton-picking accent,” I retorted. And I thought: Bobby Weed! Oh shit! Now he’s going to get on Bobby Weed. Let me out of here.
Then at this moment Sophie, as if sensing the perhaps sinister shift in Nathan’s mood, hurried to his side and touched his shoulder with a fluttery, nervously placating hand. “Nathan,” she said, “no more about Bobby Weed. Please, Nathan! It will just disturb you when we were having such a lovely time.” She cast me a look of distress. “All week he’s been talking about Bobby Weed. I can’t get him to stop.” To Nathan again she begged, “Please, darling, we were having such a lovely time!”
But Nathan was not to be deflected. “What about Bobby Weed?” he demanded of me.
“Well, what about him, for Christ’s sake?” I groaned, and pulled myself upward out of his grasp. I had begun to eye the door and the intervening furniture, and quickly schemed out the best way of immediate exit. “Thanks for the beer,” I muttered.
“I’ll tell you what about Bobby Weed,” Nathan persisted. He was not about to allow me off the hook, and dumped more foaming beer into the glass which he pressed into my hand. His expression still seemed calm enough but was betrayed by inner excitement in the form of a waggling, hairy, didactic forefinger which he thrust into my face. “I’ll tell you something about Bobby Weed, Stingo my friend. And that is this! You Southern white people have a lot to answer for when it comes to such bestiality. You deny that? Then listen. I say this as one whose people have suffered the death camps. I say this as a man who is deeply in love with one who survived them.” He reached up and surrounded Sophie’s wrist with his hand while the forefinger of his other hand still made its vermiform scrawl in the air above my cheekbone. “But mainly I say this as Nathan Landau, common citizen, research biologist, human being, witness to man’s inhumanity to man. I say that the fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do you agree with me?”
I bit the inside of my mouth
in an effort to keep my composure. “What happened to Bobby Weed, Nathan,” I replied, “was horrible. Unspeakable! But I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would you mind taking your finger out of my face?” I felt my brow growing moist and feverish. “And I damn well question this big net you’re trying to throw out to catch all of what you call you Southern white people. Goddamnit, I’m not going to swallow that line! I’m Southern and I’m proud of it, but I’m not one of those pigs—those troglodytes who did what they did to Bobby Weed! I was born in Tidewater Virginia, and if you’ll pardon the expression, I regard myself as a gentleman! Also, if you’ll pardon me, this simplistic nonsense of yours, this ignorance coming from somebody so obviously intelligent as yourself truly nauseates me!” I heard my voice climb, quavering, cracked and no longer under control, and I feared another disastrous coughing fit as I watched Nathan calmly rising to his full height, so that in effect we were confronting each other. Despite the now rather threatful forward-thrusting nature of his stance and the fact that he outmanned me in bulk and stature, I had the powerful urge to punch him in the jaw. “Nathan, let me tell you something. You are now dealing in the cheapest kind of New York-liberal, hypocritical horseshit! What gives you the right to pass judgment on millions of people, most of whom would die before they’d harm a Negro!”
“Ha!” he replied. “See, it’s even in your speech pattern’ Nig-ro! I find that so offensive.”
“It’s the way we say it down there. It’s not meant to offend. All right—Knee-grow. Anyway,” I went on impatiently, “what gives you the right to pass judgment? I find that so offensive.”
“As a Jew, I regard myself as an authority on anguish and suffering.” He paused and as he gazed at me now I thought I saw for the first time contempt in his look, and mounting disgust. “As for this ‘New York-liberal’ evasion, this ‘hypocritical horseshit’—I consider that a laughably feeble, insubstantial comeback to an honest accusation. Aren’t you able to perceive the simple truth? Aren’t you able to discern the truth in its awful outlines? And that is that your refusal to admit responsibility in the death of Bobby Weed is the same as that of those Germans who disavowed the Nazi party even as they watched blandly and unprotestingly as the thugs vandalized the synagogues and perpetrated the Kristallnacht. Can’t you see the truth about yourself? About the South? After all, it wasn’t the citizens of New York State who destroyed Bobby Weed.”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 166