NATHAN RECAPTURED US easily, not a minute too soon.
After our remarkably sweet and easy reconciliation—Sophie and Nathan and Stingo—one of the first things that I remember happening was this: Nathan gave me two hundred dollars. Two days after their happy reunion, after Nathan had reestablished himself with Sophie on the floor above and I had ensconced myself once more in my primrose-hued quarters, Nathan learned from Sophie the fact that I had been robbed. (Morris Fink, incidentally, had not been the culprit. Nathan noticed that my bathroom window had been forced—something Morris would not have had to do. I was ashamed of my nasty suspicion.) The next afternoon, returning from lunch at a delicatessen on Ocean Avenue, I found on my desk his check made out to me for that sum which in 1947, to a person in my state of virtual destitution, can only be described as, well, imperial. Clipped to the check was the handwritten note: To the greater glory of Southern Literature. I was flabbergasted. Naturally, the money was a godsend, bailing me out at a moment when I was frantic with worry over the immediate future. It was next to impossible to turn it down. But my various religious and ancestral scruples forbade my accepting it as a gift.
So after a great deal of palaver and good-natured argument, we reached what might be called a compromise. The two hundred dollars would remain a gift so long as I remained an unpublished writer. But when and if my novel found a publisher and made enough money to relieve me from financial pressure—then and only then would Nathan accept any repayment I might wish to make (without interest). A still, small, mean-spirited voice at the back of my mind told me that this largesse was Nathan’s way of atoning for the horrid attack he had made on my book a few nights before, when he had so dramatically and cruelly banished Sophie and me from his existence. But I dismissed the thought as unworthy, especially in the light of my newly acquired knowledge, through Sophie, of that drug-induced derangement which had doubtless caused him to say hatefully irresponsible things—words it was now clear he no longer remembered. Words which I was certain were as lost to his recollection as his own loony, destructive behavior. Besides, I was quite simply devoted to Nathan, at least to that beguiling, generous, life-enhancing Nathan who had shed his entourage of demons—and since it was this Nathan who had returned to us, a Nathan rather drawn and pale but seemingly purged of whatever horrors had possessed him on that recent evening, the reborn warmth and brotherly affection I felt was wonderful; my delight could only have been surpassed by the response of Sophie, whose joy was a form of barely controlled delirium, very moving to witness. Her continuing, unflagging passion for Nathan struck me with awe. His abuse of her was plainly either forgotten or completely pardoned. I’m certain she would have gathered him into her bosom with as much hungry and heedless forgiveness had he been a convicted child molester or ax murderer.
I did not know where Nathan had spent the several days and nights since that awful performance he had put on at the Maple Court, although something Sophie said in an offhand way made me think that he had sought refuge with his brother in Forest Hills. But his absence and his whereabouts did not seem to matter; in the same way, his devastating attractiveness made it seem of small importance that he had recently reviled Sophie and me in such an outpouring of animosity and spite that it made us both physically ill. In a sense, the in-and-out addiction which Sophie had so vividly and scarily described to me had the effect of drawing me closer to Nathan, now that he was back; romantic as my reaction doubtless was, his demonic side—that Mr. Hyde persona who possessed him and devoured his entrails from time to time—seemed now an integral and compelling part of his strange genius, and I accepted it with only the vaguest misgivings about some frenzied recurrence in the future. Sophie and I were—to put it obviously—pushovers. It was enough that he had reentered our lives, bringing to us the same high spirits, generosity, energy, fun, magic and love we had thought were gone for good. As a matter of fact, his return to the Pink Palace and his establishment once again of the cozy love nest upstairs seemed so natural that to this day I cannot remember when or how he transported back all the furniture and clothing and paraphernalia he had decamped with that night, replacing them so that it appeared that he had never stormed off with them at all.
It was like old times again. The daily routine began anew as if nothing had ever happened—as if Nathan’s violent furor had not come close to wrecking once and for all our tripartite camaraderie and happiness. It was September now, with the heat of summer still hovering over the sizzling streets of the borough in a fine, lambent haze. Each morning Nathan and Sophie took their separate subway trains at the BMT station on Church Avenue—he to go to his laboratory at Pfizer, she to Dr. Blackstock’s office in downtown Brooklyn. And I returned happily to my homely little oaken writing desk. I refused to let Sophie obsess me as a love object, yielding her up willingly again to the older man to whom she so naturally and rightfully belonged, and acquiescing once more in the realization that my claims to her heart had all along been modest and amateurish at best. Thus, with no Sophie to cause me futile woolgathering, I got back to my interrupted novel with brisk eagerness and a lively sense of purpose. Naturally, it was impossible not to remain haunted and, to some extent, intermittently depressed over what Sophie had told me about her past. But generally speaking, I was able to put her story out of my mind. Life does indeed go on. Also, I was caught up in an exhilaratingly creative floodtide and was intensely aware that I had my own tragic chronicle to tell and to occupy my working hours. Possibly inspired by Nathan’s financial donation—always the most bracing form of encouragement a creative artist can receive—I began to work at what for me has to be described as runaway speed, correcting and polishing as I went, dulling one after another of my Venus Velvet pencils as five, six, seven, even eight or nine yellow sheets became piled on my desk after a long morning’s work.
And (totally aside from the money) Nathan returned once more to that role of supportive brother-figure, mentor, constructive critic and all-purpose cherished older friend whom I had so looked up to from the very beginning. Again he began to absorb my exhaustively worked-over prose, taking the manuscript upstairs with him to read after several days’ work, when I had acquired twenty-five or thirty pages, and returning a few hours later, usually smiling, almost always ready to bestow upon me the single thing I needed most—praise—though hardly ever praise that was not modified or honestly spiced by a dollop of tough criticism; his eye for the sentence hobbled by an awkward rhythm, for the attitudinized reflection, the onanistic dalliance, the less than felicitous metaphor, was unsparingly sharp. But for the most part I could tell that he was in a straightforward way captivated by my dark Tidewater fable, by the landscape and the weather which I had tried to render with all the passion, precision and affection that it was within my young unfolding talent to command, by the distraught little group of characters taking flesh on the page as I led them on their anxiety-sick, funereal journey across the Virginia lowlands, and, I think, finally and most genuinely by some fresh vision of the South that (despite the influence of Faulkner which he detected and to which I readily admitted) was uniquely and, as he said, “electrifyingly” my own. And I was secretly delighted by the knowledge that subtly, through the alchemy of my art, I seemed gradually to be converting Nathan’s prejudice against the South into something resembling acceptance or understanding. I found that he no longer directed at me his jibes about harelips and ringworm and lynchings and rednecks. My work had begun to affect him strongly, and because I so admired and respected him I was infinitely touched by his response.
“That party scene at the country club is terrific,” he said to me as we sat in my room early one Saturday afternoon. “Just that little scrap of dialogue between the mother and the colored maid—I don’t know, it just seems to me right on target. That sense of summer in the South, I don’t know how you do it.”
I preened inwardly, murmuring my thanks and swallowed part of a can of beer. “It’s coming along fairly well,” I said, conscious of my strained modesty. “I’m glad you like it, really glad.”
“Maybe I should go down South,” he said, “see what it’s like. This stuff of yours whets my appetite. You could be the guide. How would that suit you, old buddy? A trip through the old Confederacy.”
I found myself positively leaping at the idea. “God, yes!” I said. “That would be just tremendous! We could start in Washington and head on down. I have an old school pal in Fredericksburg who’s a great Civil War buff. We could stay with him and visit all the northern Virginia battlefields. Manassas, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania—the whole works. Then we’d get a car and go down to Richmond, see Petersburg, head toward my father’s farm down in Southampton County. Pretty soon they’ll be harvesting peanuts...”
I could tell that Nathan had warmed immediately to this proposal, or endorsement, nodding vigorously while in my own wound-up zeal I continued to embellish the outlines of the travelogue. I saw the trip as educative, serious, comprehensive—but fun. After Virginia: the coastal region of North Carolina where my dear old daddy grew up, then Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, and a slow journey through the heart of Dixieland, the sweet bowels of the South—Alabama, Mississippi—finally ending up in New Orleans, where the oysters were plump and juicy and two cents apiece, the gumbo was glorious and the crawfish grew on trees. “What a trip!” I crowed, cutting open another can of beer. “Southern cooking. Fried chicken. Hush puppies. Field peas with bacon. Grits. Collard greens. Country ham with redeye gravy. Nathan, you gourmet, you’ll go crazy with happiness!”
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?
“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 than 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.
Pleasant enough little round knockers like plump cantaloupes, but nothing about her approaches the perfection of that ass which, save perhaps for Sophie’s, is the paragon of world behinds, two lunar globes of such heartless symmetry that even in the rather drab Peck & Peck-type flannel skirts she sometimes wears, I feel an ache shoot through my gonads as though they’d been kicked by a mule. Osculatory ability: so-so, she is a piker compared to Leslie, whose gymnastic tongue-work will haunt me forever. But even though Mary Alice, like Leslie, will permit me to lay not a finger on any of the more interesting crannies or recesses of her incredibly desirable body, why is it that I am discomfited by the bizarre fact that the one thing she will do, though in a pleasureless and rather perfunctory way, is to whack me off hour after hour until I am a lifeless and juiceless stalk, exhausted and even humiliated by this dumb pursuit? At first it was wildly exciting, almost the first contact of its kind in my life, the feel of that little Baptist hand on my prodigiously straining shaft, and I capitulated immediately, drenching us both, which to my surprise (given her general squeamishness) she didn’t seem to mind, blandly swabbing herself off with my proffered handkerchief. But after three nights and nine separate orgasms (three each night, counted methodically) I have become very close to being desensitized, and I realize that there is something nearly insane about this activity. My unspoken hint (a very gentle downward urging of her head with my hand) that she might wish to commit upon me what the Italians call the act of fellatio was met with such an abrupt show of revulsion—as if she were about to eat raw kangaroo meat—that I abandoned that avenue once and for all.
And so the nights wear on in sweaty silence. Her sweet young breasts remain firmly imprisoned, rigid in their iron Maidenform behind the chaste cotton blouse. There is no welcome or access to that longed-for treasure which she keeps between her thighs: it is as safe as Fort Knox. But lo! every hour on the hour out pops my rigid rod again and Mary Alice grabs it with stoical indifference, pumping wearily away like some marathon bellringer while I pant and groan ludicrously and hear myself whimpering such asininities as “Oh God, that’s good, Mary Alice!” and catch a glimpse of her lovely and totally unconcerned face even as there rises in me lust and despair in almost equal measure—with despair, however, ascendant regarding this loutish business. It is full dawn now and the serene Ramapo hills are filled with mist and the chatter of birds. Poor old John Thomas is as limp and as moribund as a flayed worm. I wonder why it has taken me these several nights to realize that my nearly suicidal despondency arises at least in part from the pathetic knowledge that the act which Mary Alice performs upon me with such sangfroid is something I could do much better myself, certainly with more affection.
It was toward the end of my stay with Jack Brown—one gray rainy morning with the first chilly breath of autumn in it—that I made the following entry in my notebook. The spidery, uncertain handwriting, which of course I am unable to reproduce here, is testimony to my emotional distress.
A sleepless night, or nearly so. I cannot blame Jack Brown, whom I like so much, either for my discomfiture or for his own misconception. It’s not his fault that Mary Alice is such a thorn to me. Plainly, he thinks that for the past week or so Mary Alice and I have been fucking like polecats, for some remarks he has made to me in private (accompanied by meaningful nudges) clearly indicate that he believes that I have had my pleasure with his beautiful sister-in-law. Coward that I am, I cannot force myself to disabuse him of this belief. Tonight after a fine dinner which included the best Virginia ham I have ever tasted, the four of us go to a cretinous movie in Nyack. Afterwards, at a little past midnight, Jack and Dolores retire to their bedchamber while Mary Alice and I, ensconced in our love nest on the downstairs sunporch, resume our doomed ritual. I drink a great deal of beer, to make myself magisterial. The “smooching” begins, quite pleasurable at first, and after interminable minutes of this foreplay, there starts the repetitious and inevitable build-up toward what for me has now become a boring, nearly unbearable messiness. No longer needing me to initiate the move, Mary Alice gropes for my zipper, her mean little hand ready to perform its spiritless operation on my equally jaded appendage. This time, however, I halt her midway, prepared for the showdown I have anticipated all day. “Mary Alice,” I say, “why don’t we level with each other? For some reason we haven’t really talked about this problem. I like you so much, but quite frankly I can’t take any more of this frustrating activity. Is it fear of...” (I hesitate to be explicit, largely because she is so sensitive about language.) “Is it fear of... you know what? If it is, I just wanted to say that I have the means to prevent any... accident. I promise I’ll be very careful.” After a silence she leans her head with its fine luxuriant hair smelling so hurtfully of gardenia against my shoulder, sighs, then says, “No, it’s not that, Stingo.” She falls silent. “What is it, then?” I say. “I mean, don’t you understand that except for kissing I literally haven’t touched you—anywhere! It just doesn’t seem right, Mary Alice. In fact, there’s something down-right perverse about what we’re doing.” After a pause, she says, “Oh, Stingo, I don’t know. I like you very much too, but you know we’re not in love. Sex and love for me are inseparable. I want everything to be right for the man I love. For both of us. I was burnt so badly once.” I reply, “How do you mean burnt? Were you in love with someone?” She says, “Yes, I thought so. He burnt me so badly. I don’t want to get burnt again.”
And as she talks to me, telling me about her late lamented amour, a ghastly Cosmopolitan short story emerges, explaining simultaneously the sexual morality of these 1940s and the psychopathology which permits her to torment me in the way she has been doing. She had a fiancé, one Walter, she tells me, a naval aviator who courted her for four months. During this time before their engagement (she explains to me in circumlocutory language to which Mrs. Grundy would not have taken exception) they did not participate in formal sexual relations, although at his behest she did learn, presumably with the same lackluster and rhythmic skill she has practiced on me, to flog his dick (“stimulate him”), and indulged in this pastime night after night as much to give him some “release” (she actually uses the odious word) as to protect the velvet strongbox he was perishing to get into. (Four months! Think of Walt’s Navy-blue trousers and those oceans of come!) Only when the wretched flyboy formally declared his intentions to marry and then produced the ring (Mary Alice continues to tell me in vapid innocence) did she yield up her darling honey pot, for in the Baptist faith of her upbringing, woe as certain as death would alight upon those who would engage in carnal congress without at least the prospect of matrimony. Indeed, as she goes on to say, she felt it wicked enough to do what she did before the actual hitching of the knot. At this point Mary Alice pauses and, backtracking, says something to me which causes me to grind my teeth in rage. “It’s not that I don’t desire you, Stingo. I have strong desires. Walter taught me to make love.” And while she continues to talk, murmurously spinning out her banalities about “consideration,” “tenderness,” “fidelity,” “understanding,” “sympathy” and other Christian garbage, I have an unusual and overpowering longing to perpetrate a rape. Anyway, to conclude her tale, Walter left her before the wedding day—the shock of her life. “That was how I got burnt so badly, Stingo, and I just don’t want to get burnt that way again.”
I am silent for a while. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s a sad story,” I add, trying to still the sarcasm striving to be expressed. “Very sad. I guess it happens to a lot of people. But I think I know why Walter left you. And tell me something, Mary Alice, do you really think that two healthy young people who are attracted to each other have to go through this masquerade about marriage before they fuck each other? Do you really?” I feel her turn rigid and hear her gasp at the horrid verb; she pulls away from me, and something about her prissy chagrin enrages me more. She is suddenly (and I now see justifiably) astounded at my unplugged fury spilling forth and as I too pull away and stand up shaking, quite out of control now, I see her lips, all smeared with the red goo of our kissing, form a little oval of fright. “Walter didn’t teach you to make love, you lying creepy little idiot!” I say loudly. “I’ll bet you’ve never had a good fuck in your life! All Walter taught you was how to jerk off the poor slobs who want to get into your pants! You need something to make that beautiful ass of yours gyrate with joy, a big stiff prick rammed into that cunt you’ve got locked up, oh shit—” I break off in a strangled cry, smothered with shame at my outburst but near loony laughter too, for Mary Alice has stuck her fingers in her ears like a six-year-old and the tears are rolling down her cheeks, I give a beery belch. I am repulsive. Yet I still cannot restrain myself from howling at her, “You cock teasers have turned millions of brave young men, many of whom died for your precious asses on the battlefields of the world, into a generation of sexual basket cases!” Then I storm off the porch and stomp upstairs to bed. And after hours of sleeplessness I drowse off and have what because of its Freudian obviousness I would be loath to put into a novel but what, Dear Diary, I must not shrink from telling You: my First Homosexual Dream!
Sometime late that morning, not long after finishing the foregoing entry in my journal and writing a few letters, I was sitting at the table where I had worked so well those past days, brooding glumly over the dumfounding homo-erotic apparition which had passed like a thick black cloud across my consciousness (festering in my heart and making me fear for the basic well-being of my soul), when I heard Jack Brown’s limping footsteps on the stairs, followed by the sound of his voice calling me. I did not really hear or respond right away, so deeply had I fallen into my funk over the appalling and very real possibility that I had turned queer. The nexus between Mary Alice’s rejection of me and my sudden metamorphosis into sexual deviation seemed a little too pat; nonetheless, I could not deny the possibility.
I had read quite a bit about sexual problems while studying at that noted athenaeum of psychology, Duke University, and had come away with some fairly well established facts: that male primates in captivity, for instance, when denied female companionship, will try to bugger each other, often with gleeful success, and that many prisoners after long periods of incarceration will turn so readily to homosexual activity that it will almost appear to be the norm. Men who have been many months at sea will take their pleasure with one another; and when I was in the Marine Corps (a branch, of course, of the Navy) I was intrigued to learn the ancient origin of “pogey bait,” the slang name for candy: it obviously sprang from the inducement held out by older sailors for the favors of fair-cheeked, smooth-bottomed young cabin boys. Ah well, I thought, if I have become a pederast, so be it; there was ample precedent for my condition, since although I had not been formally confined or caged, I may have just as well been in prison or on a timeless voyage on a brigantine as far as my lifelong efforts at good, wholesome, heterosexual screwing were concerned. Was it not plausible that some psychic valve in me, analogous to whatever controls the libido of a twenty-year convict or a lovelorn ape, had blown its gaskets, leaving me guiltlessly different, victim of the pressures of biological selection but nonetheless a pervert?
I was darkly considering this proposition, and then Jack’s commotion at the door brought me up sharp. “Wake up, junior, there’s a telephone call!” he shouted. I knew on the way downstairs that the call could only come from the Pink Palace, where I had left Jack’s number, and I had a sense of foreboding which was amplified enormously when I heard the familiar voice, dolorosa, of Morris Fink.
“You got to come down here right away,” he said, “all hell has broke loose.”
My heart faltered, then raced on. “What happened?” I whispered.
“Nathan’s went off his trolley again. This time it’s real bad. The miserable fucker.”
“Sophie!” I said. “How is Sophie?”
“She’s all right. He beat her up again, but she’s all right. He said he was goin’ to kill her. She ran out of the house and I don’t know where she is. But she asked me to call you. You’d better come.”
“And Nathan?” I said.
“He’s gone too, but he said he’d be back. The crazy bastard. You think I should call the police?”
“No, no,” I replied quickly. “For Christ’s sake, don’t call the police!” After a pause I said, “I’ll be there. Try and find Sophie.”
After I hung up I stewed for a few minutes, and when Jack came downstairs I joined him in a cup of coffee to try to settle my agitation. I had spoken to him before about Sophie and Nathan and their folie à deux but only in dim outline. Now I felt compelled to hurriedly fill in some of the more painful details. His immediate suggestion was to do what for some dumb reason it had not occurred to me to do. “You’ve got to call the brother,” he insisted.
“Of course,” I said. I jumped to the phone again, only to be met with that impasse which more often than not throughout life seems to stymie people at moments of extreme crisis. A secretary told me that Larry was in Toronto, where he was attending a professional convention. His wife was with him. In those antediluvian pre-jet days Toronto was as far away as Tokyo, and I gave a moan of despair. Then just as I had hung up, again the phone rang. Once more it was the steadfast Fink, whose troglodyte manners I had cursed so often but whom I now blessed.
“I just heard from Sophie,” he said.
“Where is she?” I shouted.
“She was at the office of that Polish doctor she works for. But she’s not there now. She went out to the hospital to get an x-ray of her arm. She said Nathan might of broke it, the fuckin’ bum. But she wants you to come down. She’ll stay at that doctor’s office this afternoon until you get there.” And so I went.
For many young people in the throes of late-adolescent growth, the twenty-second year is the most anxiety-filled of all. I realize now how intensely discontented, rebellious and troubled I was at that age, but also how my writing had kept serious emotional distress safely at bay, in the sense that the novel I was working on served as a cathartic instrument through which I was able to discharge on paper many of my more vexing tensions and miseries. My novel of course was more than this, too, yet it was the vessel I have described, which is why I so cherished it as one cherishes the very tissues of one’s being. Still, I was quite vulnerable; fissures would appear in the armor I had wrapped around me, and there were moments when I was assaulted by Kierkegaardian dread. The afternoon I hurried away from Jack Brown’s to find Sophie was one of these times—an ordeal of extreme fragility, ineffectualness and self-loathing. On the bus rocking south through New Jersey to Manhattan, I sat cramped and exhausted in a nearly indescribable miasma of fright. I had a hangover, for one thing, and the jangling nervousness heightened my apprehension, causing me to shudder at the coming showdown with Sophie and Nathan. My failure with Mary Alice (I had not even said goodby to her) had unpinned the very moorings of what was left of my virility, and made me all the more despondent over the suspicion that throughout these years I had deluded myself about my faggot propensities. Somewhere near Fort Lee, I caught a reflected glimpse of my ashen, unhappy face superimposed against a panorama of filling stations and drive-ins and tried to close my eyes and mind to the horror of existence.
The hour was getting on toward five in the afternoon by the time I made it to Dr. Blackstock’s office in downtown Brooklyn. It was apparently after office hours, for the reception room was empty save for a rather pinched and spinsterish woman who alternated with Sophie as secretary-receptionist; she told me that Sophie, who had been gone since late morning, had not yet returned from having her arm x-rayed but should be back at any moment. She invited me to sit and wait, but I preferred to stand, and then found myself pacing about restlessly in a room painted—drowned would be more exact—in the most gruesome shade of deep purple I had ever seen. How Sophie had worked day after day basking in such a creepy hue baffled me. The walls and ceiling were done in the same mortician’s magenta which Sophie had told me adorned the Blackstock home in St. Albans. I wondered if such berserk decorator’s witchery might not also have been concocted by the late Sylvia, whose photograph—decked with black bunting, like that of a saint—smiled down from one wall with a kind of engulfing benignancy. Other photographs plastered everywhere attested to Blackstock’s familiarity with the demigods and goddesses of pop culture, in one after another frantically gemütlich display of palship: Blackstock with a popeyed Eddie Cantor, Blackstock with Grover Whalen, with Sherman Billingsley and Sylvia at the Stork Club, with Major Bowes, with Walter Winchell, even Blackstock with the Andrews Sisters, the three songbirds with their plentiful hair closely surrounding his face like large grinning bouquets, the doctor poutingly proud above the inked scrawl: Love to Hymie from Patty, Maxene and LaVerne. In the morbid, nervous mood I was in, the pictures of the merry chiropractor and his friends brought me as far down into bottomless despondency as I had ever been, and I prayed for Sophie to arrive and help relieve my angst. And just then she came through the door.
Oh, my poor Sophie. She was hollow-eyed and disheveled, exhausted-looking, and the skin of her face had the washed-out sickly blue of skim milk—but mainly she looked aged, an old lady of forty. I took her gently in my arms and we said nothing for a while. She did not weep. Finally I looked at her and said, “Your arm. How is it?”
“It’s not broken,” she replied, “just a bad bruise.”
“Thank God,” I said, then added, “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,“ she murmured, shaking her head, “I just don’t know.”
“We’ve got to do something,” I said, “we’ve got to get him in some kind of custody where he won’t harm you.” I paused, a sense of futility overpowering me, along with ugly guilt. “I should have been here,” I groaned. “I had no business going away. I might have been able to—”
But Sophie halted me, saying, “Hush, Stingo. You mustn’t feel that way. Let’s go get a drink.”
Sitting on a stool at the fake-morocco bar of a hideous mirrored Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street, Sophie told me what had happened during my absence. It was bliss at first, unqualified joy. She had never known Nathan to be in such a serene and sunny mood. Much preoccupied with our coming trip south, and plainly looking forward to the wedding day, he went into a kind of prothalamic fit, taking Sophie through a weekend buying spree (including a special excursion to Manhattan, where they spent two hours at Saks Fifth Avenue) during which she wound up with a huge sapphire engagement ring, a trousseau fit for a Hollywood princess, and a wildly expensive travel wardrobe calculated to knock the eyes out of the natives of such backwater centers as Charleston, Atlanta and New Orleans. He had even thought to drop into Cartier’s, where he had bought me a watch as a best man’s gift. Subsequent evenings they spent boning up on Southern geography and Southern history, both of them tackling various travel guides and he spending long hours with Lee’s Lieutenants as preparation for the tours around the Virginia battlefields I had promised to inflict upon them.
It was all done in Nathan’s careful, intelligent, methodical way, with as much attention to the arcana of the various regions we would be traveling through (the botany of cotton and peanuts, the origins of certain local dialects such as Gullah and Cajun, even the physiology of alligators) as that of a British colonial empire builder of the Victorian era setting forth toward the sources of the Nile. He infected Sophie with his enthusiasm, imparting to her all sorts of useful and useless information about the South, which he accumulated in gobs and bits like lint; loving Nathan, she loved it all, including such worthless lore as the fact that more peaches are grown in Georgia than in any other state and that the highest point in Mississippi is eight hundred feet. He went so far as to go around to the Brooklyn College library and check out two novels by George Washington Cable. He developed an adorable drawl, which filled her with gaiety.
Why had she not been able to detect the warning signals when they began to glimmer? She had watched him carefully all this time, she was certain he had stopped taking his amphetamines. But then the day before, when they had both gone to work—she to Dr. Blackstock’s, he to his “lab”—something must have caused him to slip off the path, just what, she would never know. In any case, she was stupidly off guard and vulnerable when he put out the first signals, as he had before, and she failed to read their portent: the euphoric telephone call from Pfizer, the voice too high-pitched and excited, the announcement of incredible victories in the offing, a grandiose “breakthrough,” a majestic scientific discovery. How could she have been so dumb? Her description of Nathan’s furious eruption and the ensuing damage and debris was for me—in my frazzled state—agreeably laconic, but somehow more searing by its very brevity.
“Morty Haber was giving a party for a friend who was going off for a year to study in France. I worked late to help send out bills at the office and I had told Nathan that I would eat near the office and meet him later at the party. Nathan didn’t come until long after I got there, but I could tell when I first saw him how high he was. I almost fainted when I saw him, knowing that he’d probably been that way all day, even when I got that phone call, and that I had been too stupid to even—well, even be alarmed. At the party he behaved all right. I mean, he wasn’t... unruly or anything but I could tell so well he was on Benzedrine. He talked to some people about his new cure for polio, and my heart sort of died. I said to myself then that maybe Nathan would come down off this high and just go to sleep finally. Sometimes he would do that, you know, without getting violent. Finally Nathan and I went home, it was not too late, about twelve-thirty. It was only when we got home that he began screaming at me, building up into this great rage. Doing what he always done, you know, when he was in the middle of his worst tempête, which is to accuse me of being unfaithful to him. Of, well, screwing somebody else.”
Sophie halted for an instant, and as she raised her left hand to throw back a lock of hair I sensed something slightly unnatural in the gesture, wondered what it was, then realized that she was favoring her right arm, which hung limply at her side. It obviously was causing her pain.
“Who was he after you about this time?” I demanded. “Blackstock? Seymour Katz? Oh Christ, Sophie, if the poor guy wasn’t so wacky, I wouldn’t be able to stand this without wanting to knock his teeth out. Jesus, who does he have you cuckolding him with now?”
She shook her head violently, the bright hair tossing in an uncombed and untidy way above the forlorn, haggard face. “It don’t matter, Stingo,” she said, “just somebody.”
“Well, then what else happened?”
“He screamed and shouted at me. He took more Benzedrine—maybe cocaine too, I don’t know what exactly. Then he went out the door with this enormous slam. He shouted that he was never coming back. I lay there in the dark, I couldn’t sleep for a long time, I was so worried and scared. I thought of calling you but it was terribly late by then. Finally I couldn’t stay awake any more and went to sleep. I don’t know how long I slept, but when he come back it was dawn. He come in the room like an explosion. Raving, shouting. He woke up the whole house again. He dragged me out of bed and throwed me on the floor and shouted at me. About me having sex with—well, this man, and how he would kill me and this man and himself. Oh mon Dieu, Stingo, never, never was Nathan in such a state, never! He kicked me hard finally—hard, on the arm here, and then he left. And later I left. And that was all.” Sophie fell silent.
I put my face down slowly and gently on the mahogany surface of the bar with its damp patina of cigarette ash and water rings, wanting desperately to be overtaken by coma or some other form of beneficent unconsciousness. Then I raised my head and looked at Sophie, saying, “Sophie, I don’t want to say this. But Nathan simply must be put away. He’s dangerous. He has to be confined.” I heard gurgle up in my voice a sob, vaguely ludicrous. “Forever.”
With a trembling hand she signaled to the bartender and asked for a double whiskey on ice. I felt I could not dissuade her, even though her speech already had a glutinous, slurred quality. After the drink came she took a hefty gulp and then, turning to me, said, “There is something else I didn’t tell you. About when he come back at dawn.”
“What?” I said.
“He had a gun. A pistol.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit,” I heard myself murmur, a cracked record. “Shit, shit, shit, shit...”
“He said he was going to use it. He pointed it at my head. But he didn’t use it.”
I made a whispered, not entirely blasphemous invocation, “Jesus Christ, have mercy.”
But we could not just sit there bleeding to death with these gaping wounds. After a long silence I decided on a course of action. I would go with Sophie to the Pink Palace and help her pack up. She would leave the house immediately, taking a room for that night, at least, in the St. George Hotel, which was not far away from her office. Meanwhile, throughout all this, I would somehow find the means to get in touch with Larry in Toronto, telling him of the extreme danger of the situation and urging him to come back at all costs. Then, with Sophie safely in her temporary seclusion, I would do my damnedest to find Nathan and somehow deal with him—though this prospect filled my stomach with dread like a huge, sick football. I was so unstrung that even as I sat there I came close to regurgitating my single beer. “Let’s go,” I said. “Now.”
At Mrs. Zimmerman’s I paid that faithful mole Morris Fink fifty cents to help us cope with Sophie’s baggage. She was sobbing and, I could see, rather drunk as she tramped about her room stuffing clothes and cosmetics and jewelry into a large suitcase.
“My beautiful suits from Saks,” she mumbled. “Oh, what should I do with them?”
“Take them with you, for Christ’s sake,” I said impatiently, heaving her many pairs of shoes into another bag. “Forget protocol at a time like this. You’ve got to hurry. Nathan might be coming back.”
“And my lovely wedding dress? What shall I do with it?”
“Take it, too! If you can’t wear it, maybe you can hock it.”
“Hock?” she said.
“Pawn.”
I had not meant to be cruel, but my words caused Sophie to drop a silk slip to the floor and then raise her hands to her face, and bawl loudly, and shed helpless, glistening tears. Morris looked on morosely as I held her for a moment and uttered futile soothing sounds. It was dark outside and the roar of a truck horn along a nearby street made me jump, shredding my nerve endings like some evil hacksaw. To the general hubbub was added now the monstrous jangle of the telephone in the hallway, and I think I must have stifled a groan, or perhaps a scream. I became even further unstrung when Morris, having silenced the Gorgon by answering it, bellowed out the news that the call was for me.
It was Nathan. It was Nathan, all right. Plainly, unmistakably, unequivocally it was Nathan. Then why for an instant did my mind play an odd trick on me, so that I thought it was Jack Brown calling up from Rockland County to check on the situation? It was because of the Southern accent, that perfectly modulated mimicry which made me believe that the possessor of such a voice had to be one teethed on fatback and grits. It was as Southern as verbena or foot-washing Baptists or hound dogs or John C. Calhoun, and I think I even smiled when I heard it say, “What’s cookin’, sugah? How’s your hammer hangin’?”
“Nathan!” I exclaimed with contrived heartiness. “How are you? Where are you? God, it’s good to hear from you!”
“We still gonna take that trip down South? You and me an’ ol’ Sophie? Gonna do the Dixie tour?”
I knew that I had to humor him in some way, make small talk while trying at the same time to discover his whereabouts—a subtle matter—so I replied instantly, “You’re damn right we’re going to make that trip, Nathan. Sophie and I were just talking it over. God, those are sensational clothes you bought her! Where are you now, old pal? I’d love to come and see you. I want to tell you about this little side trip I’ve got planned—”
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.