William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  She was perplexed. He sat down beside her again. “Why are you going to take me to your brother?” she asked.

  “My brother’s a doctor,” he replied, “one of the best doctors going. He can help you.”

  “But you...” she began, then halted. “I thought...”

  “You thought I was a doctor,” he said. “No, I’m a biologist. How do you feel?”

  “Better,” she said, “much better.” And this was true, not the least, she realized, because of his comforting presence.

  He had brought with him a grocery bag, which he now opened, extracting the contents rapidly and deftly and laying them out on the large board near the end of her bed which served as a kitchen table. “Vot a mishegoss,” she heard him say. She began to giggle, for he had gone into a very low-key comedy routine, his accent all of a sudden profoundly and luxuriously Yiddish as he catalogued the bottles and cans and cardboard cartons pouring forth from the bag, his face furrowed in a perfect replica of some elderly harassed, purblind, nervously parsimonious Flatbush storekeeper. He reminded her of Danny Kaye (so many times she had seen him, one of her few movie obsessions), with this wonderfully rhythmic and absurd inventory, and she was still shaking with silent laughter when he ceased, turned toward her and held up a can with a white label, bedewed with frosty beads. “Consommé madriléne,” he said in his normal voice. “I found a grocery where they keep it on ice. I want you to eat it. Then you’ll be able to swim five miles, like Esther Williams.”

  She was aware that her appetite had returned and felt an eager spasm in her empty stomach. When he poured the consommé into one of her cheap plastic bowls she raised herself up on one elbow and ate pleasurably, savoring the soup, cool and gelatinous with a tart aftertaste. Finally she said to him, “Thank you, I feel much better now.”

  She sensed again such intensity in his gaze as he sat beside her, not speaking for a nearly interminable space, that despite her trust in him, she began to feel a little uneasy. Then at last he said, “I will bet anyone a hundred dollars that you have a severe deficiency anemia. Possibly folic acid or B-twelve. But most probably iron. Baby, have you been eating properly recently?”

  She told him that except for the short period a few weeks before, when she had caused herself to suffer a half-voluntary rejection of food, she had for the past six months eaten more healthy and handsomely than at any time in her life. “I have these problems,” she explained. “I cannot eat much fat of animals. But all else is okay.”

  “Then it’s bound to be a deficiency of iron,” Nathan said. “In what you describe you’ve been eating you’d have had more than adequate folic acid and B-twelve. All you need is a trace of both. Iron’s a great deal trickier, though. You could have fallen behind with iron and never had a chance to catch up.” He paused, perhaps aware of the apprehension in her face (for what he had been saying puzzled and troubled her), and gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s one of the easiest things in the world to treat, once you’ve got it nailed down.”

  “Nail down?”

  “Once you understand what the trouble is. It’s a very simple thing to cure.”

  For some reason she was embarrassed to ask his name, although she was dying to know. As he sat there beside her, she stole a glimpse of his face and decided that he was exceedingly agreeable-looking—unmistakably Jewish, with fine symmetrical lines and planes in the midst of which the strong, prominent nose was an adornment, as were his luminously intelligent eyes that could switch from compassion to humor and back again so rapidly and easily and naturally. Once more his very presence made her feel better; she was suffused by a drowsy fatigue but the nausea and deep malaise were gone. Then suddenly, lying there, she had a lazy, bright inspiration. Earlier in the day, after looking at the radio schedule in the Times, she had been badly disappointed to learn that on account of her English class she would miss a performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony on the early-afternoon concert over WQXR. It was a little like her rediscovery of the Sinfonia Concertante, yet with a difference. She remembered the symphony so clearly from her past—again, those concerts in Cracow—but here in Brooklyn, because she had no phonograph and because she always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Pastoral had completely eluded her, forever tantalizingly announcing itself but remaining unheard like some gorgeous but mute bird flitting away as she pursued it through the foliage of a dark forest.

  Now she realized that due to today’s misadventure she could at last hear the music; it seemed far more crucial to her existence at the moment than this medical talk, no matter how encouraging its overtones, and so she said, “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” She had scarcely spoken the words when he reached across her and switched it on just an instant before the Philadelphia Orchestra, with its murmurous strings, hesitant at first then jubilantly swelling, commenced that inebriate psalm to the flowering globe. She experienced a sensation of beauty so intense that it was as if she were dying. She shut her eyes and kept them firmly closed to the very end of the symphony, at which point she opened them again, embarrassed by the tears streaming down her cheeks but unable to do anything about them, or to say anything sensible or coherent to the Samaritan, who was still gazing down at her with grave and patient concern. Lightly he touched the back of her hand with his fingers.

  “Are you crying because that music is so beautiful?” he said. “Even on that crummy little radio?”

  “I don’t know why I am crying,” she replied after a long pause during which she collected her senses. “Maybe I’m just crying because I made a mistake.”

  “How do you mean, mistake?” he asked.

  Again she waited for a long time before saying, “Mistake about hearing the music. I thought that the last time I hear that symphony was in Cracow when I was a very young girl. Now just then when I listened I realize that I heard it once after that, in Warsaw. We was forbidden to have radios, but one night I listened to it on this forbidden radio, from London. Now I remember it is the last music I ever hear before going...” And she halted. What on earth was she saying to this stranger? What did it matter to him? She pulled a piece of Kleenex from the drawer of her table and dried her eyes. “That is not a good reply.”

  “You said ‘before going... ’ ” he went on. “Before going where? Do you mean the place where they did this?” He glanced pointedly at the tattoo.

  “I can’t talk about that,” she said suddenly, regretting the way she blurted the words out, which caused him to turn red and to mutter in a flustered voice, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m a terrible intruder... I’m just an ass sometimes. An ass!”

  “Please don’t say that,” she put in quickly, ashamed of the way her tone had confounded him. “I didn’t mean to be so... ” She paused, in sequence groping for then finding the right word in French, Polish, German and Russian but totally at sea in English. So she said only, “I’m sorry.”

  “I have a knack for poking my big schnoz into places where it has no business,” he said, as she watched the rosy flush of embarrassment recede from his face. Then abruptly he said, “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got an appointment. But listen—can I come back tonight? Don’t answer that! I’ll be back tonight.”

  She couldn’t answer. Having been swept off her feet (no figure of speech but a literal truth, for that is just what he had done two hours before; carrying her crumpled in his arms from the library to the place by the curb where he had hailed the taxi), she could only nod and say yes and smile a smile which still lingered as she heard him clatter down the steps. The time after that dragged badly. She was amazed at the excitement with which she had awaited the sound of his stomping shoes when, at about seven in the evening, he returned, bringing another bulging grocery bag and two dozen of the most bewitchingly lovely long-stemmed yellow roses she had ever seen. She was up and around now, feeling almost fully recovered, but he ordered her to relax, saying, “Please, you just let Nathan take charge.” This was the moment when she first heard his name
. Nathan. Nathan! Nathan, Nathan!

  Never, never, she told me, would she ever forget this initial meal they had together, the sensuously concocted dinner which he fashioned from, of all humble things, calf’s liver and leeks. “Loaded with iron,” he proclaimed, the sweat popping out on his brow as he bent over the sputtering hot plate. “There is nothing better than liver. And leeks—filled with iron! Also will improve the timbre of your voice. Did you know that the Emperor Nero had leeks served to him every day to deepen the sonority of his voice? So he could croon while he had Seneca drawn and quartered? Sit down. Quit fussing around!” he commanded. “This is my show. What you need is iron. Iron! That’s why we’re also going to have creamed spinach and a plain little salad.” She was captivated by the way in which Nathan, ever intent upon cooking, was still able to intersperse his observations on gastronomie with scientific detail, largely nutritional. “Liver with onions is of course standard, but with leeks, sweetiepie, it becomes something special. These leeks are hard to find, I got them in an Italian market. It is as plain as the nose on your pretty but incredibly pale face that you need massive infusions of iron. Therefore the spinach. There was some research not long ago which came up with the interesting discovery that the oxalic acid content of spinach tends to neutralize a lot of the calcium, which you probably need also. Too bad, but it’s still so loaded with iron that you’ll get a good jolt of it anyway. Also the lettuce...”

  But if the dinner, though excellent in itself, was mainly restorative, the wine was ambrosial. In the household of her early youth, in Cracow, Sophie had grown up with wine, her father having possessed a strain of hedonism which caused him to insist (in a country as barren of vineyards as Montana) that her mother’s ample and often elegant Viennese meals be accompanied with some regularity by the fine wines of Austria and the Hungarian plains. But the war, which had swept so much else out of her life, had obliterated such a simple pleasure as wine, and since then she had not bothered to go out of her way to drink any, even if she had been tempted to within the purlieus of Flatbush, its constituency pledged to Mogen David. But she had no notion of this—this gods’ liquor! The bottle Nathan brought was of such a quality as to make Sophie want to redefine the nature of taste; ignorant of the mystique of French wine, she did not need to be told by Nathan that it was a Châateau-Margaux, or that it was a 1937—the last of the great prewar vintages—or that it cost the flabbergasting sum of fourteen dollars (roughly half her salary for a week, she noted with incredulity as she caught a glimpse of the price on the sticker), or that it might have gained in bouquet had there been time to decant it first. Nathan went on and on divertingly about such matters. But she only knew that the savor of it gave her an unparalleled sense of delight, a luscious and reckless and great-hearted warmth that spread downward to her toes, validating all quaint and ancient maxims as to the healing properties of wine. Light-headed, woozy, she heard herself say to her provider toward the end of the meal, “You know, when you live a good life like a saint and die, that must be what they make you to drink in paradise.” To which Nathan made no direct reply, appearing to be pleasantly mellow himself as he peered at her gravely and thoughtfully through the ruby dregs of his glass. “Not ‘to drink,’ ” he corrected her gently, “just ‘make you drink.’ ” Then he added, “Forgive me. I’m a confirmed and frustrated schoolmaster.”

  Then after dinner was over and they had washed the dishes together they sat down opposite each other in the two uncomfortable straight-backed chairs with which at that time the room was furnished. Suddenly Nathan’s attention was caught by the handful of books in a row on a shelf above Sophie’s bed—the Polish translations of Hemingway and Wolfe and Dreiser and Farrell. Rising for a moment, he examined the books curiously. He said some things which made her feel that he was familiar with these writers; he spoke with special enthusiasm of Dreiser, telling her that in college he had read straight through the enormous length of An American Tragedy in a single sitting, “nearly putting my eyes out in the process,” and then in the midst of a rhapsodic description of Sister Carrie, which she had not yet read but which he insisted that she do (assuring her that it was Dreiser’s masterpiece), he stopped short in mid-sentence and gazed at her with a pop-eyed clownish look that made her laugh, and said, “You know, I haven’t the faintest notion of who you are. What do you do, Polish baby?”

  She paused for a long time before replying, “I work for a doctor, part time. I am his receptionist.”

  “A doctor?” he said, clearly with great interest. “What kind of a doctor? “

  She sensed that she was having enormous difficulty in getting the word out. But finally she said it. “He’s a—a chiropractor.”

  Sophie could almost see the spasm that went through his entire body at the sound of what she had said. “A chiropractor. A chiropractor! No wonder you’ve got troubles!”

  She found herself trying to make a foolish and lame excuse. “He’s a very nice man...” she began. “He’s what you call”—resorting suddenly to Yiddish—“a mensh. His name is Dr. Blackstock.”

  “Mensh, shmensh,” he said with a look of deep distaste, “a girl like you, working for some humbug—”

  “It was the only job I could get, when I come here,” she put in. “It was all I could do!” Now she felt herself speaking with some irritation and feeling, and either what she said or the sudden brusque way she said it caused him to mutter a quick apology. “I know,” he said, “I shouldn’t say that. It’s none of my business.”

  “I would like something better, but I have no talents.” She spoke more calmly now. “I begun an education, you see, a long time ago, but it never was finished. I am, you see, a very uncomplete person. I wished somehow to teach, to teach music, to become a teacher of music—but this was impossible. So I am a receptionist in this office. It’s not so bad, vraiment—although I would like to do something better one day.”

  “I’m so sorry for what I said.”

  She gazed at him, touched by the discomfort he seemed to suffer over his own maladroitness. In as long as she could remember she had never met anyone to whom she was so immediately drawn. There was something so appealingly intense, energetic and various about Nathan—his quiet but firm domination, his mimicry, his comic bluster about things culinary and medical, which, she felt, was the thinnest disguise for his real concern for her health. And at last this awkward vulnerability and self-reproach, which in some remote and indefinable way reminded her of a small boy. For an instant she wished he would touch her again, then the feeling went away. They were both silent for a long moment as a car slithered by on the street outside where a light rain was falling and the evening chimes from the distant church dropped nine notes on Brooklyn’s vast, reverberant midsummer stillness. Far off, thunder rolled faintly over Manhattan. It had become dark and Sophie switched on her solitary table lamp.

  Perhaps it was only the seraphic wine or Nathan’s calm and uninhibiting presence, but she felt the urge not to halt where she had left off but to continue talking, and as she talked she felt her English moving more or less smoothly and with nearly unhampered authority, as if through remarkably efficient conduits she hardly knew she possessed. “I have nothing left from the past. Nothing at all. So that is one of the reasons why, you see, I feel so uncomplete. Everything you see in this room is American, new—books, my clothes, everything—there is nothing at all that remains from Poland, from the time when I was young. I don’t even have a picture from that time. One thing I much regret about losing is that album of photographs I once had. If I only had been able to keep it, I could show you so many interesting things—how it was in Cracow before the war. My father was a professor at the university but he was also a very talented photographer—an amateur, but very good, you know, very sensitive. He had a very expensive fantastic Leica. I remember one of the pictures he take that was in this album, one of his best ones that I so regret to lose, was of me and my mother sitting at the piano. I was about thirteen then. We must hav
e been playing a composition for four hands. We looked so happy, I remember, my mother and me. Now, somehow, just the memory of that photograph is a symbol for me, a symbol of what was and could have been and now cannot be.” She paused, inwardly proud of her fluidly shifting tenses, and glanced up at Nathan, who had leaned forward slightly, totally absorbed by her sudden outpouring. “You must see clearly, I do not pity myself. There are far worse things than being unable to finish a career, not to become what one had planned to be. If that was all I had ever lost, I would be completely content. It would have been wonderful for me to have had the career in music that I thought I would have. But I was prevented. It is seven, eight years since I have read a note of music, and I do not even know if I could read music again. Anyway, that is why I can’t any longer choose my job, so I have to work in the way that I do.”

  After a bit he said, with that disarming directness that she had come to rather enjoy, “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

  “No,” she replied. “Did you think I was?”

  “At first I guess I just assumed you were. There are not many blond goyim roaming around Brooklyn College. Then I took a closer look at you in the taxi. There I thought you were Danish, or maybe Finnish, eastern Scandinavian. But, well—you have those Slavic cheekbones. Finally, by deduction I pegged you for a Polack, excuse me, divined that you were of Polish extraction. Then when you mentioned Warsaw, I was sure. You are a very beautiful Polack, or Polish lady.”

  She smiled, aware of the warm blush in her cheeks. “Pas de flatterie, monsieur.”

  “But then,” he went on, “all these preposterous contradictions. What in God’s name is a darling Polish shiksa doing working in the office of a chiropractor named Blackstock, and where on earth did you learn Yiddish? And lastly—and goddamnit, you’re going to have to put up with my prying nose again, but I’m concerned about your condition, don’t you see, and I’ve got to know these things!—lastly, how did you get that number on your arm? You don’t want to talk about it, I know. I hate asking, but I think you’ve got to tell me.”