“I don’t know how much Nathan ever told you about himself. Or about our family.” Larry poured me another ale.
“Not much,” I said, momentarily surprised that this indeed was so.
“I won’t bore you with a great deal of detail, but our father made—well, quite a few bucks. In, of all things, canning kosher soups. When he arrived here from Latvia he spoke not a word of English, and in thirty years he made, well, a bundle. Poor old man, he’s in a nursing home now—a very expensive nursing home. I don’t mean to sound vulgar. I’m only bringing this up to emphasize the kind of medical care the family has been able to afford for Nathan. He’s had the very best treatment that money can buy, but nothing has really worked on a permanent basis.’’
Larry paused, and with the pause came a drawn-out sigh, touched with hurt and melancholy. “So for all these last years it’s been in and out of Payne Whitney or Riggs or Menninger or wherever, with these long periods of relative tranquillity when he acts as normally as you or I. When we got him this little job at the Pfizer library we thought it might be a time when he had undergone a permanent remission. Such remissions or cures are not unheard of. In fact, there’s a reasonably high rate of cure. He seemed so content there, and although it did get back to us that he was boasting to people and magnifying his job all out of proportion, that was harmless enough. Even his grandiose delusions about creating some new medical marvel haven’t harmed anyone. It looked as if he had settled down, was on his way to—well, normality. Or as normal as a nut can ever become. But now there’s this sweet, sad, beautiful, fouled-up Polish girl of his. Poor kid. He’s told me they’re going to get married—and what do you, Stingo, think of that?”
“He can’t get married, can he, when he’s like this?” I said.
“Hardly.” Larry halted. “But how can one prevent him, either? If he were out-and-out uncontrollably insane, we would have to put him away forever. That would solve everything. But the terrible difficulty, you see, lies in the fact that there are these lengthy periods when he appears to be normal. And who is to say that one of these long remissions doesn’t really represent what amounts to a complete cure? There are many such cases on record. How can you penalize a man and prevent him from living a life like everyone else by simply assuming the worst, assuming that he will go completely berserk again, when such might not be the case? And yet suppose he marries that nice girl and suppose they have a baby. Then suppose he really goes off his rocker again. How unfair that would be to—well, to everyone!” After a moment’s silence he gazed at me with a penetrating look and said, “I don’t have any answer. Do you have an answer?” He sighed again, then said, “Sometimes I think life is a hideous trap.”
I stirred restlessly in my chair, suddenly so unutterably depressed that I felt I was bearing on my back the weight of all the universe. How could I tell Larry that I had just seen his brother, my beloved friend, as close to the brink as he had ever been? Throughout my life I had heard about madness, and considering it an unspeakable condition possessed by poor devils raving in remote padded cells, had thought it safely beyond my concern. Now madness was squatting in my lap. “What is it that you think I can do?” I asked. “I mean, why did you—”
“Why did I ask you here?” he interrupted gently. “I’m not quite sure that I know myself. I think it’s because I have an idea that you could be useful in helping him stay off the drugs. That’s the most treacherous problem for Nathan now. If he stays away from that Benzedrine, he might have a fair chance to straighten himself out. I can’t do much. We’re very close in many ways—whether I like it or not, I am a kind of model for Nathan—but I also realize that I am an authority figure that he’s apt to resent. Besides, I don’t see him that frequently. But you—you’re really close to him and he respects you, too. I’m just wondering if there isn’t some way in which you might be able to persuade him—no, that’s too strong a word—to influence him so that he lays off that stuff that might kill him. Also—and I wouldn’t ask you to be a spy if Nathan weren’t in such a perilous condition—also, you could simply keep tabs on him and report back to me by phone from time to time, letting me know how he’s getting on. I’ve felt completely out of touch so often, and rather helpless, but if I could just hear from you now and then, you’d be doing all of us a great service. Does any of this seem unreasonable?”
“No,” I said, “of course not. I’d be glad to help. Help Nathan. And Sophie too. They’re very close to me.” Somehow I felt it was time to go, and I rose to shake Larry’s hand. “I think things might get better,” I murmured with what could only seem, in the innermost part of my conscience, despairing optimism.
“I certainly hope so,” said Larry, but the look on his face, forlorn despite his twisted effort at a smile, made me feel that his optimism was as bleak and troubled as my own.
I’m afraid that soon after my meeting with Larry, I was guilty of a grave dereliction. Larry’s brief conference with me had been in the nature of an appeal on his part, an appeal to me to keep an eye on Nathan and to act as liaison between the Pink Palace and himself—to serve both as sentinel and as a kind of benign watchdog who might be able to gently nip at Nathan’s heels and keep him under control. Plainly, Larry thought that during this delicate hiatus in Nathan’s period of drug addiction I might be able to calm him, settle him down, and perhaps even work some lasting, worthwhile effect. After all, wasn’t this what good friends were for? But I copped out (a phrase not then in use, but perfectly descriptive of my negligence, or, to be more exact, my abandonment). I have sometimes wondered whether if I had stayed on the scene during those crucial days I might not have been able to exercise some control over Nathan, preventing him from going on his last slide toward ruin, and too often the answer to myself has been a desolating “yes” or “probably.” And shouldn’t I have tried to tell Sophie of the grim matters I had learned from Larry? But since, of course, I cannot ever be perfectly certain of what would have happened, I have tended always to reassure myself through the flimsy excuse that Nathan was in the process of a furious, unalterable and predetermined plunge toward disaster—a plunge in which Sophie’s destiny was welded indissolubly to his own.
One of the odd things about this was that I was gone for a short time—less than ten days. Except for my Saturday jaunt with Sophie to Jones Beach, it was my only journey outside the confines of New York City since my arrival in the metropolis many months before. And the trip was barely beyond the city limits at that—to a peaceful rustic house in Rockland County barely half an hour by car north of the George Washington Bridge. This was all the result of another unexpected voice on the telephone. The caller was an old Marine Corps friend who had the notably unexceptional name of Jack Brown. The call had been a total surprise, and when I asked Jack how in God’s name he had tracked me down, he said that it had been simple: he had telephoned down to Virginia and had obtained my number from my father. I was delighted to hear the voice: the Southern cadence, as rich and broad as the muddy rivers that flowed through the low-country South Carolina of Jack Brown’s birth, tickled my ear like beloved banjo music long unheard. I asked Jack how he was doing. “Fine, boy, just fine,” he replied, “livin’ up here among the Yankees. Want you to come up here to pay me a visit.”
I adored Jack Brown. There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in afteryears, no matter how genuine; Jack was one of these friends. He was bright, compassionate, well-read, with a remarkably inventive comic gift and a wonderful nose for frauds and four-flushers. His wit, which was often scathing and which relied on a subtle use of Southern courthouse rhetoric (doubtless derived in part from his father, a distinguished judge), had kept me laughing during the enervating wartime months at Duke, where the Marine Corps, in its resolve to transform us from green cannon fodder into prime cannon fodder, tried to stuff us with two years’ education in less than a year, thereby creating
a generation of truly half-baked college graduates. Jack was a bit older than I—a critical nine months or so—and thus became chronologically scheduled to see combat, whereas I was lucky and escaped with my hide intact. The letters he wrote to me from the Pacific—after military exigencies had separated us and he was preparing for the assault on Iwo Jima while I was still studying platoon tactics in the swamps of North Carolina—were wondrous long documents, drolly obscene and touched with a raging yet resigned hilarity which I assumed was Jack’s exclusive property until I saw it miraculously resurrected years later in Catch-22. Even when he was horribly wounded—he lost most of one of his legs on Iwo Jima—he maintained a cheerfulness I could only describe as exalted, writing me letters from his hospital bed that bubbled with a mixture of joie de vivre and Swiftian corrosiveness and energy. I am sure it was only his mad and sovereign stoicism that prevented him from falling into suicidal despair. He was completely unperturbed by his artificial limb, which, he said, gave him a kind of seductive limp, like Herbert Marshall.
I remark upon all this only to give an idea of Jack’s exceptional allure as a person, and to explain why I jumped at his invitation at the cost of neglecting my obligations in regard to Nathan and Sophie. At Duke, Jack had wanted to become a sculptor, and now after postwar study at the Art Students’ League, he had removed himself to the serene little hills behind Nyack to fashion huge objects in cast iron and sheet metal—aided (he allowed to me without reticence) by what might be construed as a fine dowry, since his bride was the daughter of one of the biggest cotton-mill owners in South Carolina. When at first I made some faint-hearted objections, saying that my novel which was rolling along so well might suffer from the abrupt interruption, he put an end to my worries by insisting that his house had a small wing where I could work all by myself. “Also, Dolores,” he added, referring to his wife, “has her sister up here visiting. Her name is Mary Alice. She’s a very filled-out twenty-one and, son, believe me, she’s pretty as a picture. By Renoir, that is. She’s also very eager.” I happily pondered that word eager. It may be easily assumed, given my perennially renewed, pathetic hope for sexual fulfillment as already set down in this chronicle, that I needed no further enticement.
Mary Alice. Good Christ, Mary Alice. I will deal with Mary Alice almost immediately. She is important to this story for the perverse psychic effect she had on me—an effect which for a time, though mercifully brief, malignantly colored my final relationship with Sophie.
As for Sophie herself, and Nathan, I must briefly mention the little party we had at the Maple Court on the evening of my departure. It should have been a gay event—and to an outsider it would have appeared so—but there were two things about it which filled me with discomfort and foreboding. First, there was the matter of Sophie’s drinking. During the short space of time since Nathan’s return Sophie had, I noticed, abstained from the booze, possibly only because of Nathan’s cautionary presence; in the “old days” I had rarely seen either of them indulge much more in alcohol than their ritual bottle of Chablis. Now, however, Sophie had reverted to the drinking pattern she had adopted with me during Nathan’s absence, slugging down shot after shot of Schenley’s, though as usual holding it all rather well despite an eventual clumsiness of the tongue. I had no idea why she had gone back to the hard stuff. I said nothing, of course—Nathan being the ostensible master of the situation—but it troubled me painfully, troubled me that Sophie appeared to be so rapidly turning into a lush; and I was further disconcerted over the fact that Nathan did not seem to notice, or if he did, failed to take the protective measures that such heavy, distracted and potentially dangerous drinking called for.
That evening Nathan was his usual engaging, garrulous self, ordering for me schooners of beer until I was woozy and ready to float away. He captivated Sophie and me with a series of howlingly funny show-biz stories, profoundly Jewish, which he had picked up somewhere. I thought him to be in the healthiest shape I had seen him since the first day months before when he had laid siege to my consciousness and heart; I felt myself actually shivering with delight in the presence of such a funny, rambunctiously appealing human being, and then in one swift short statement he caused my good cheer to flow away like water gurgling down a drain. Just as we had risen to go back to the Pink Palace his tone turned serious, and gazing at me from that smoky region behind the pupil of the eye where I knew dementia lurked, he said, “I didn’t want to tell you this until now, so you’ll have something to think about tomorrow morning on your way to the country. But when you come back we’ll have something really incredible to celebrate. And that’s this: my research team is on the verge of announcing a vaccine against”—and here he paused and ceremoniously spelled out the word, so touched with fear in those days, in all of its involute syllables—“pol-i-o-my-e-li-tis.” Finis to infantile paralysis. No more March of Dimes. Nathan Landau, mankind’s deliverer. I wanted to cry. Doubtless I should have said something, but remembering all that Larry had told me, simply could not speak, and so I walked slowly back in the dark to Mrs. Zimmerman’s, listening to Nathan’s loony embroidery on tissue and cell cultivation, pausing once to whack Sophie on the back to exorcise her tipsy hiccups, but all the while remaining utterly without words as my heart filled up with pity and dread...
Even these many years later it would be pleasant to report that my stay in Rockland County brought me some sort of compensating release from my worries over Nathan and Sophie. A week or ten days of hard productive work and the jolly fornication which Jack Brown’s innuendoes had caused me to anticipate—such activities might have been sufficient reward for the anxiety I had suffered and, God help me, would suffer again soon to a degree I had not thought possible. But I recall the visit, or much of it, as a fiasco, and I have retained convincing evidence of this within the covers of the same notebook where earlier in this narrative I memorialized my affair with Leslie Lapidus. My sojourn in the country logically should have been the heady, halcyon happening I so warmly looked forward to. After all, the ingredients were there: an appealingly weathered and rambling old Dutch Colonial homestead set back deep in the woods, a charming young host and his vivacious wife, a comfortable bed, plenty of good Southern cooking, lots of booze and beer, and bright hope for consummation at last in the embrace of Mary Alice Grimball, who had a shiny flawless triangular face with saucy dimples, lovely moist lips parted eagerly, overflowing honey-hued hair, a degree in English from Converse College, and the most gorgeous sweetheart of an ass that ever sashayed its way north from Spartanburg.
What could be more inviting and freighted with promise than such a setup? Here is the horny young bachelor hard at his writing all day, aware only of the pleasant chink-chink of the tools of his peglegged sculptor friend and the smell of chicken and hush puppies frying in the kitchen, his work impelled to even greater flights of exquisite nuance and power by the knowledge, pleasurably roosting at the mind’s edge, that the evening will bring friendly relaxation, good food, talk murmurous with down-home Southern nostalgia—all this fragrantly buoyed by the presence of two delightful young women, one of whom in the darkness of the coming night he will make whisper, moan and squeal with joy amid tangled sheets in the hotter tangle of love. Indeed, the purely domestic aspects of this fantasy were well realized. I did work a great deal during those days with Jack Brown and his wife and Mary Alice. The four of us swam often in the pool in the woods (the weather remained quite warm), the mealtime get-togethers were festive and good-natured, and the talk was filled with rich reminiscence. But there was suffering too, and it was in the early hours of those mornings when, time after time, I would steal away with Mary Alice that I found myself exposed, literally, to a form of sexual eccentricity I had never dreamed existed and have never experienced since. For Mary Alice was—as I grimly and comparatively anatomized her in my notes (set down in the same frantic unbelieving scrawl which I had used to record my other disastrous liaison several months before)—
—something worse th
an a Cock Tease, a Whack-off artist. I sit here in the hours just before dawn listening to the crickets and contemplating her dismal artistry for the third morning running, wondering at the calamity that has happened to me. Again I have inspected myself in the bathroom mirror, seen nothing amiss in my physiognomy, indeed I must say modestly that all is well: my strong nose and brown intelligent eyes, good complexion, excellent bone structure (not so fine, thank God, as to appear “aristocratic,” but possessing enough angularities to prevent my looking coarsely plebeian) and rather humorous mouth and chin all merge into a face that could reasonably be called handsome, though it is certainly far from the stereotype handsomeness of a Vitalis ad. So she could not be repelled by my looks. Mary Alice is sensitive, literate, which is to say, widely read in one or two of the same books in which I have an interest, has a decent sense of humor (hardly a barrel of laughs, but then, who could be in the shadow of Jack Brown’s wit), seems relatively advanced and liberated in “worldly” matters for a girl of her background, which is intensely Southern. Rather atavistically, she does seem to mention church-going a little too often. Neither of us has done anything so rash or heedless as to utter protestations of love, but it is evident that she is, at least mildly, aroused sexually. In this regard, however, she is a reverse image of Leslie, since despite her (I think, partly counterfeit) passion in our hottest embrace, she is utterly prudish (like so many Southern girls) in the realm of language. When, for instance, an hour or so into our first “lovemaking” session night before last I was carried away enough to softly remark upon the marvelous ass I thought she had and, in my excitement, made a vain attempt to reach around and lay a hand on it, she drew away with a savage whisper (“I hate that word!” she said. “Can’t you say ‘hips’?”) and I realized then that any further indecencies might prove fatal.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 217