AFTER MY SOLITARY that evening at the Longchamps restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue, I counted my money and reckoned my total worth at something less than fifty dollars. Although, as I said, I was without real fear in my plight, I could not help feeling a trifle insecure, especially since the prospects of getting another job were next to zero. Yet I need not have worried at all, for in a couple of days I was to receive a windfall which would rescue me—for the immediate future, at least. It was a bizarre and phenomenal stroke of luck, my receipt of this gift, and like another instance of great good fortune much later in my life, it had its origins in the institution of American Negro slavery. Although it bears only indirectly upon the new life I would take up in Brooklyn, the story of this gift is so unusual as to be worth recounting.
It has chiefly to do with my paternal grandmother, who was a shrunken little doll of an old lady approaching ninety when she told me about her slaves. I have often found it a little difficult to believe that I have been linked so closely in time to the Old South, that it was not an earlier generation of my ancestors who owned black people, but there it is: born in 1848, my own grandmother at the age of thirteen possessed two small Negro handmaidens only a little younger than herself, regarding them as beloved chattel all through the years of the Civil War, despite Abraham Lincoln and the articles of emancipation. I say “beloved” with no irony because I’m certain that she did very much love them, and when she recollected Drusilla and Lucinda (for those were their incomparable names) her ancient trembling voice cracked with emotion, and she told me “how dear, how dear” the little girls were to her, and how in the chill depths of the war she had to search high and low for woolen yarn in order to knit them stockings. This was in Beaufort County, North Carolina, where she had spent all of her life, and it is there that I remember her. Every Easter and Thanksgiving during the thirties we traveled down from our home in Virginia to see her, my father and I, driving across the swampland and the flat, changeless fields of peanuts and tobacco and cotton, the forlorn nigger cabins decrepit and unchanging too. Arriving in the somnolent little town on the Pamlico River, we greeted my grandmother with soft words and exceptional tenderness, for she had been nearly totally paralyzed from a stroke for many years. Thus it was at her bedside when I was twelve or thirteen that I heard firsthand about Drusilla and Lucinda, and camp meetings, and turkey shoots, and sewing bees, and river-boat excursions down the Pamlico, and other ante-bellum joys, the sweet chirpy old voice feeble yet unflagging, until at last it gave out and the gentle lady went to sleep.
It is important, though, to note that my grandmother never told me or my father about another slave child—he bore the jaunty name of Artiste—who, like Drusilla and Lucinda, had been “given” to her by her father and then soon after had been sold by him. As I will shortly demonstrate through two related letters, the reason that she never mentioned the boy doubtless has to do with the extraordinary story of his ultimate fate. In any case, it is interesting that my grandmother’s father, after consummating the sale, converted the proceeds into Federal gold dollars of various denominations, no doubt in shrewd foreknowledge of the disastrous war to come, and placed the coins in a clay jug which he buried beneath an azalea at the back of the garden. This was, of course, to prevent their discovery by the Yankees, who in the last months of the war did arrive with a clatter of hoofs and scintillant sabers, dismantled the interior of the house before my grandmother’s frightened girlish eyes, ransacked the garden, but found no gold. I am able, incidentally, to recall my grandmother’s description of the Union troops with absolute clarity: “Dashing handsome men really, they were only doing their duty when they tore up our house, but naturally they had no culture or breeding. I’m certain they were from Ohio. They even threw the hams out of the window.” Arriving back himself from the awful war with one eye missing and with a shattered kneecap—both wounds received at Chancellorsville—my great-grandfather unearthed the gold, and after the house once again became habitable, stashed it away in an ingeniously concealed compartment in the cellar.
There the treasure might have remained until kingdom come, for unlike those mysterious hoards one sometimes reads about in the news—packets of greenbacks or Spanish doubloons and such uncovered by the shovels of workmen—the gold would have seemed destined to be hidden in perpetuity. When my great-grandfather died in a hunting accident around the end of the century, his will made no mention of the coins—presumably for the very good reason that he had passed the money along to his daughter. When in turn she died forty years later, she did refer to the gold in her will, specifying that it should be divided among her many grandchildren; but in the fuzzy-mindedness of great age she had forgotten to state where the treasure was hidden, somehow confusing the cellar compartment with her safe deposit box in the local bank, which of course yielded up nothing in the way of this peculiar legacy. And for seven more years no one knew of its whereabouts. But it was my father, last surviving son of my grandmother’s six children, who rescued the trove from its musty oblivion amid the termites and the spiders and the mice. Throughout his long life his concern for the past, for his family and its lineage, had been both reverent and inspired—a man quite as blissfully content to browse through the correspondence and memorabilia of some long-defunct, dull and distant cousin as is a spellbound Victorian scholar who has stumbled on a drawer full of heretofore unknown obscene love letters of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Imagine his joy, then, when going through fading packets of his mother’s letters he should discover one written to her from my great-grandfather describing not only the exact location of the cellar cache but also the details of the sale of the young slave Artiste. And so now two letters intertwine. The following communication from my father in Virginia, which I received just as I was packing up to leave the University Residence Club; tells much not only about several Southern generations but about the great events that were close on the modern horizon.
June 4, 1947
My dearest son,
I have at hand your letter of the 26th inst., telling of the termination of your employment. On the one hand, Stingo, I am sorry about this since it puts you in financial straits and I am in no position to be of much help, beset as I am already by the seemingly endless troubles and debts of your two aunts down in N.C. who I fear are prematurely senile and in a pathetic way. I hope to be better situated fiscally in some months, however, and would like to think I might then be able to contribute in a modest way to your ambitions to become a writer. On the other hand, I think you may be well shut of your employment at McGraw-Hill, which by your own account sounded fairly grim, the firm anyway being notoriously little else but the mouthpiece and the propaganda outlet for the commercial robber barons who have preyed on the American people for a hundred years and more. Ever since your great-grandfather came back half-blind and mutilated from the Civil War and together with my father tried to set up a humble trade manufacturing snuff and chewing tobacco down in Beaufort County—only to have their dreams shattered when they were forced out of business by those piratical devils, Washington Duke and his son, “Buck” Duke—ever since my knowledge of that tragedy I have had an undying hatred for the vicious monopoly capitalism that tramples the little man. (I deem it an irony that your education should have been received at an institution founded upon the ill-gotten lucre of the Dukes, though that’s hardly a fault of yours.)
You doubtless remember Frank Hobbs, with whom I have driven to work at the shipyard for so many years. He is a good solid man in many ways, born in a peanut patch over in Southampton County, but as you may recall a man of such simon-pure reactionary beliefs that he often sounds rabid even by Virginia standards. Therefore we do not often talk ideology or politics. After the recent revelation of the horrors of Nazi Germany he is still an anti-semite and insists that it is the international Jewish financiers who have a stranglehold on the wealth. Which of course would send me into hoots of laughter were it not so benighted a viewpoint, so that even though I concede to Hobbs that Rothschild and Warburg are certainly Hebraic names I attempt to tell him that greed is not a racial but a human prediliction and then I proceed to tick off such names as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, Mellon, Harriman, Huntington, Whitney, Duke, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. This scarcely makes a dent on Hobbs, who in any event is able to direct his bile upon a much easier and more ubiquitous target, especially in this part of Va., i.e., and I do not have to tell you—the negro. This we simply do not talk about much or often, for at aet. 59 I am too old to engage in a fist fight. Son, the handwriting is on the wall. If the negro is as he is so often said to be “inferior,” whatever that means, it is plainly because he has been so disadvantaged and deprived by us the master race that the only face he can present to the world is the hangdog face of inferiority. But the negro cannot stay down forever. No force on earth is going to keep a people of whatever color in the squalor and the poverty I see hereabouts, city and countryside. I do not know if the negro will ever begin to be re-enfranchised in my lifetime, I am not that optimistic, but he certainly will be in yours, and I would give almost anything I own to be alive when that day comes, as it surely will, when Harry Byrd sees negro men and women sitting not at the back of the bus but riding free and equal through all the streets of Virginia. For that I would willingly be called that hateful epithet “nigger lover,” which I am sure I am called already in private by many, including Frank Hobbs.
Which brings me in a roundabout way to the main point of this letter. Stingo, you may recall a number of years ago when your grandmother’s will was probated we were all baffled by her reference to a certain sum in gold coins which she bequeathed to her grandchildren but which we could never find. That mystery has now been resolved. I am as you know historian of the local chapter of the Sons of the Confederacy and while in the process of writing a fairly lengthy essay on your great-grandfather I examined in detail his truly voluminous correspondence to his family, which includes many letters to your grandmother. In one letter, written in 1886 from Norfolk (he was traveling on business for his tobacco firm, this being just before the villainous “Buck” Duke destroyed him), he disclosed the true whereabouts of the gold—placed not in the safe deposit box (your grandmother obviously became confused about this later) but in a bricked-up cubbyhole in the basement of the house in N.C. I am having a photostatic copy of this letter sent to you later on, as I know of your interest in slavery and should you ever want to write about that institution this tragic epistle might provide you with fascinating insights. The money it turns out was the proceeds of the sale of a 16-year-old negro boy named Artiste, who was the older brother of your grandmother’s maidservants, Lucinda and Drusilla. The three children had been orphans when your great-grandfather had bought them together at the Petersburg, Va., auction block in the late 1850s. All three young negroes were deeded over into your grandmother’s name and the two girls worked around the house and lived there, as did Artiste who, however, was mainly hired out around the town to do chores for other families.
Then something ugly happened which your greatgrandfather speaks very delicately about in his letter to my mother. Apparently Artiste, who was in the first lusty flush of adolescence, made what your greatgrandfather calls an “improper advance” toward one of the young white belles of the town. This of course caused a tremor of threat and violence to run immediately through the community and your great-grandfather took what anyone of that time would have considered the appropriate course. He spirited Artiste out of town to New Bern, where he knew there was a trader trading in young negroes for the turpentine forests down around Brunswick, Georgia. He sold Artiste to this trader for $800. This is the money which ended up in the basement of the old house.
But the story doesn’t quite end there, son. What is so heartrending about the letter is your great-grandfather’s account of the aftermath of this episode, and the ensuing grief and guilt which so often, I have noticed, attends stories about slavery. Perhaps you have already anticipated the rest. It develops that Artiste had made no such “advance” toward the young white girl. The lass was an hysteric who soon accused another negro boy of the same offense, only to have her story proved to be a falsehood—after which she broke down and confessed that her accusation against Artiste had also been mendacious. You may imagine your great-grandfather’s anguish. In this letter to my mother he describes the ordeal of his guilt. Not only had he committed one of the truly unpardonable acts of a slave-owner—broken up a family—but had sold off an innocent boy of 16 into the grinding hell of the Georgia turpentine forests. He tells how he sent desperate inquiries by mail and private courier to Brunswick, offering at any price to buy the boy back, but at that time of course communication was both slow and unsure, and in many cases impossible, and Artiste was never found.
I discovered the $800 in precisely the place in the cellar he had described to your grandmother with such care. Often as a boy I stacked cordwood and stored apples and potatoes not six inches away from that cubbyhole. The coins over the years have, as you might imagine, appreciated in value enormously. Some of them turned out to be quite rare. I had occasion to take them up to Richmond to a coin appraiser, a numismatist I believe he is called, and he offered me something in excess of $5,500, which I accepted since this means a 700 percent return on the sale of poor Artiste. This would be a considerable sum of money in itself but as you know the terms of your grandmother’s testament state that the amount shall be divided equally among all of her grandchildren. So it might have been better for you. Unlike myself who was prudent enough in this overpopulous age to sire one son, your aunts—my incredibly philoprogenitive sisters—have brought into the world a total of 11 offspring, all healthy and hungry, all poor. Thus your share of Artiste’s sale will come to a few dollars less than $500, which I shall remit to you by certified check this week I hope, or at least as soon as this transaction is completed...
Your devoted father
Years later I thought that if I had tithed a good part of my proceeds of Artiste’s sale to the N.A.A.C.P. instead of keeping it, I might have shriven myself of my own guilt, besides being able to offer evidence that even as a young man I had enough concern for the plight of the Negro as to make a sacrifice. But in the end I’m rather glad I kept it. For these many years afterward, as accusations from black people became more cranky and insistent that as a writer—a lying writer at that—I had turned to my own profit and advantage the miseries of slavery, I succumbed to a kind of masochistic resignation, and thinking of Artiste, said to myself: What the hell, once a racist exploiter always a racist exploiter. Besides, in 1947 I needed $485 as badly as any black man, or Negro, as we said in those days.
I stayed long enough at the University Residence Club to receive the check from my father. Given proper management, the money should last me through the summer, which was just beginning, and maybe even into the fall. But where to live? The University Residence Club was no longer for me a possibility, spiritual or physical. The place had reduced me to such a shambles of absolute impotence that I found that I could not even indulge myself in my occasional autoerotic diversions, and was reduced to performing furtive pocket jobs during midnight strolls through Washington Square. My sense of solitariness was verging, I knew, on the pathological, so intensely painful was the isolation I felt, and I suspected that I would be even more lost if I abandoned Manhattan, where at least there were familiar landmarks and amiable Village byways as points of reference to make me feel at home. But I simply could no longer afford either the Manhattan prices or the rent—even single rooms were becoming beyond my means—and so I had to search the classified ads for accommodations in Brooklyn. And that is how, one fine day in June, I got out of the Church Avenue station of the BMT with my Marine Corps seabag and suitcase, took several intoxicating breaths of the pickle-fragrant air of Flatbush, and walked down blocks of gently greening sycamores to the rooming house of Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman.
Yetta Zimmerman’s house may have been the most open-heartedly monochromatic structure in Brooklyn, if not in all of New York. A large rambling wood and stucco house of the nondescript variety erected, I should imagine, sometime before or just after the First World War, it would have faded into the homely homogeneity of other large nondescript dwellings that bordered on Prospect Park had it not been for its striking—its overwhelming—pinkness. From its second-floor dormers and cupolas to the frames of its basement-level windows the house was unrelievedly pink. When I first saw the place I was instantly reminded of the facade of some back-lot castle left over from the MGM movie version of The Wizard of Oz. The interior also was pink. The floors, walls, ceilings and even most of the furniture of each hallway and room varied slightly in hue—due to an uneven paint job—from the tender rosé of fresh lox to a more aggressive bubblegum coral, but everywhere there was pink, pink admitting rivalry from no other color, so that after only a few minutes contemplating my prospective room under the proud eye of Mrs. Zimmerman, I felt at first amused—it was a cupid’s bower in which one could only barely restrain raucous laughter—and then really grimly trapped, as if I were in a Barricini candy store or the infants’ department at Gimbels. “I know, you’re thinking about the pink,” Mrs. Zimmerman had said, “everybody does. But then it gets you. It wears on you—nice, really nice that is, I mean. Pretty soon, most people they don’t want no other color.” Without my questioning, she added that her husband, Sol—her late husband—had lucked into a fantastic bargain in the form of several hundred gallons of Navy surplus paint, used for that—“you know”—and halted, finger quizzically laid aside her porous spatulate nose. “Camouflage?” I ventured. To which she replied, “Yeah, that’s it. I guess they didn’t have much use for pink on those boats.” She said that Sol had painted the house himself. Yetta was squat and expansive, sixty or thereabouts, with a slightly mongoloid cast to her cheerful features that gave her the look of a beaming Buddha.
That day I had been persuaded almost at once. First, it was cheap. Then, pink or not, the room she showed me on the ground floor was agreeably spacious, airy, sun-filled, and clean as a Dutch parlor. Furthermore, it possessed the luxury of a kitchenette and a small private bathroom in which the toilet and tub appeared almost jarringly white against the prevailing peppermint. I found the privacy itself seduction enough, but there was also a bidet, which lent a risqué note and, electrically, unconscionably stirred my expectations. I also was greatly taken by Mrs. Zimmerman’s overview of her establishment, which she expounded as she led me around the premises. “I call this place Yetta’s Liberty Hall,” she said, every now and then giving me a nudge. “What I like to see is my tenants enjoy life. They’re usually young people, my tenants, and I like to see them enjoy life. Not that I don’t gotta have rules.” She lifted the pudgy nub of a forefinger and began to tick them off. “Rule number one: no playing the radio after eleven o’clock. Rule number two: you gotta turn off all lights when you leave the room, I got no need to pay extra to Con Edison. Rule three: positively no smoking in bed, you get caught smoking in bed—out. My late husband, Sol, had a cousin burned himself up that way, plus a whole house. Rule number four: full week’s payment due every Friday. End of the rules! Everything else is Yetta’s Liberty Hall. Like what I mean is, this place is for grownups. Understand, I’m running no brothel, but you wanta have a girl in your room once in a while, have a girl in your room. You be a gentleman and quiet and have her out of there at a reasonable hour, you’ll have no quarrel with Yetta about a girl in your room. And the same thing goes for the young ladies in my house, if they want to entertain a boyfriend now and then. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose, I say, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s hypocrisy.”
This extraordinary broad-mindedness—deriving from what I could only assume was an Old World appreciation of volupté—put the final seal on my decision to move to Yetta Zimmerman’s, despite the all too problematical nature of the free hand I had been given. Where would I get a girl? I wondered. Then I was suddenly furious at myself for my lack of enterprise. Certainly the license that Yetta (we were soon on a first-name basis) had given me meant that this important problem would soon take care of itself. The salmon-hued walls seemed to acquire a wanton glow, and I vibrated with inward pleasure. And a few days later I took up residence there, warmly anticipating a summer of carnal fulfillment, philosophical ripening and steady achievement in the creative task I had cut out for myself.
My first morning—a Saturday—I rose late and strolled over to a stationery store on Flatbush Avenue and bought two dozen Number 2 Venus Velvet pencils, ten lined yellow legal pads and a “Boston” pencil sharpener, which I got permission from Yetta to screw to the frame of my bathroom door. Then I sat down in a pink straight-backed wicker chair at an oaken desk, also painted pink, whose coarse-grained and sturdy construction reminded me of the desks used by schoolmarms in the grammar-school classrooms of my childhood, and with a pencil between thumb and forefinger confronted the first page of the yellow legal pad, its barrenness baneful to my eye. How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid of inspiration, I found that nothing would come, and although I sat there for half an hour while my mind fiddled with half-jelled ideas and nebulous conceits, I refused to let myself panic at my stagnation; after all, I reasoned, I had barely settled into these strange surroundings. The previous February, during my first few days at the University Residence Club, before starting work at McGraw-Hill, I had written a dozen pages of what I planned to be the prologue of the novel—a description of a ride on a railroad train to the small Virginia city which was to provide the book’s locale. Heavily indebted in tone to the opening passages of All the King’s Men, using similar rhythms and even the same second-person singular to achieve the effect of the author grabbing the reader by the lapels, the passage was, I knew, to say the least, derivative, yet I also knew that there was much in it that was powerful and fresh. I was proud of it, it was a good beginning, and now I took it out of its manila folder and reread it for perhaps the ninetieth time. It still pleased me and I would not have wanted to change a line. Move over, Warren, this is Stingo arriving, I said to myself. I put it back in its folder.
The yellow page remained empty. I felt restless, a little goatish, and in order to keep the curtain drawn down over my brain’s ever-handy peep show of lewd apparitions—harmless, but in relation to work distracting—I got up and paced the room, which the summer sun bathed in a lurid flamingo light. I heard voices, footsteps in the room above—the walls I realized were paper thin—and I looked up and glared at the pink ceiling. I began to detest the omnipresent pink and doubted gravely that it would “wear” on me, as Yetta had said. Because of the problems of weight and volume involved, I had brought only what I considered essential books with me; few in number, they included The American College Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, my collection of John Donne, Oates and O’Neill’s Complete Greek Drama, the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (essential to my hypochondria), the Oxford Book of English Verse and the Holy Bible. I knew I could eventually build up my library piecemeal. Meanwhile, now to help summon my own muse, I tried to read Marlowe, but for some reason that lilting music failed to stir me as it usually did.
I put the book aside and moseyed into the tiny bathroom, where I began to take inventory of the articles I had placed in the medicine chest. (Years later I would be fascinated to discover a hero of J.D. Salinger duplicating my ceremony, but I claim priority.) This was a ritual, deeply rooted in the soil of inexplicable neurosis and materialistic urgency, which I have gone through many times since when vision and invention have flagged to the point of inertia, and both writing and reading have become burdensome to the spirit. It is a mysterious need to restore a tactile relationship with mere things. One by one with my fingertips I examined them where I had placed them the night before, there on the shelves of the wall cabinet which like everything else had fallen prey to Sol Zimmerman’s loony incarnadine paint brush: a jar of Barbasol shaving cream, a bottle of Alka-Seltzer, a Schick injector razor, two tubes of Pepsodent toothpaste, a Dr. West’s toothbrush with medium bristles, a bottle of Royall Lyme after-shave lotion, a Kent comb, an “injecto-pack” of Schick injector blades, an unopened cellophane-wrapped box of three dozen rolled and lubricated Trojan condoms with “receptacle tips,” a jar of Breck’s anti-dandruff shampoo, a tube of Rexall nylon dental floss, a jar of Squibb multivitamins, a bottle of Astring-o-sol mouthwash. I touched them all gently, examined the labels, and even unscrewed the cap of the Royall Lyme shaving lotion and inhaled the fruity citrus aroma, receiving considerable satisfaction from the total medicine-chest experience, which took about a minute and a half. Then I closed the door of the cabinet and returned to my writing table.
Sitting down, I lifted my gaze and looked out the window and was suddenly made aware of another element which must have worked on my subconscious and caused me to be drawn to this place. It was such a placid and agreeable view I had of the park, this corner known as the Parade Grounds. Old sycamore trees and maples shaded the sidewalks at the edge of the park, and the dappled sunlight aglow on the gently sloping meadow of the Parade Grounds gave the setting a serene, almost pastoral quality. It presented a striking contrast to remoter parts of the neighborhood. Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue, a place intensely urban, cacophonous, cluttered, swarming with jangled souls and nerves; but here the arboreal green and the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and cars, the casual pace of the few strollers at the park’s border all created the effect of an outlying area in a modest Southern city—Richmond perhaps, or Chattanooga or Columbia. I felt a sharp pang of homesickness, and abruptly wondered what in God’s name was I doing here in the unimaginable reaches of Brooklyn, an ineffective and horny Calvinist among all these Jews?
Apropos of which, I took a scrap of paper from my pocket. On it I had scribbled the names of the six other tenants in the house. Each name had been affixed on small cards by the orderly Yetta and attached to the respective doors, and with motive no more suspect than my usual rapacious curiosity I had late the night before, tiptoed about the floors and copied the names down. Five of the occupants were on the floor above, the other in the room opposite me, across the hallway. Nathan Landau, Lillian Grossman, Morris Fink, Sophie Zawistowska, Astrid Weinstein, Moishe Muskatblit. I loved these names for nothing other than their marvelous variety, after the Cunninghams and Bradshaws I had been brought up with. Muskatblit I fancied for a certain Byzantine flavor. I wondered when I would get to know Landau and Fink. The three female names had stirred my intense interest, especially Astrid Weinstein, who was in fascinating proximity across the hall. I was mulling all this over when I was made suddenly aware—in the room directly over my head—of a commotion so immediately and laceratingly identifiable, so instantly, to my tormented ears, apparent in its nature that I will avoid what in a more circumlocutory time might have required obliqueness of suggestion, and take the liberty of saying that it was the sound, the uproar, the frenzy of two people fucking like crazed wild animals.
I looked up at the ceiling in alarm. The lamp fixture jerked and wobbled like a puppet on a string. Roseate dust sifted down from the plaster, and I half expected the four feet of the bed to come plunging through. It was terrifying—no mere copulatory rite but a tournament, a rumpus, a free-for-all, a Rose Bowl, a jamboree. The diction was in some form of English, garbled and exotically accented, but I had no need to know the words. What resulted was impressionistic. Male and female, the two voices comprised a cheering section, calling out such exhortations as I had never heard. Nor had I ever listened to such goads to better effort—to slacken off, to push on, to go harder, faster, deeper—nor such huzzahs over gained first downs, such groans of despair over lost yardage, such shrill advice as to where to put the ball. And I could not have heard it more clearly had I been wearing special earphones. Clear it was, and of heroic length. Unending minutes the struggle seemed to last, and I sat there sighing to myself until it was suddenly over and the participants had gone, literally, to the showers. The noise of splashing water and giggles drifted down through the flimsy ceiling, then there were padding footsteps, more giggles, the sharp smack of what sounded like a playful paw upon a bare bottom and finally, incongruously, the ravishing sweet heartbeat of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony from a phonograph. Distraught, I went to the medicine chest and took an Alka-Seltzer.
Shortly after I returned to my table I realized that now in the same room above a spirited argument was in progress. It had come with phenomenal speed, this dark and stormy mood. I couldn’t hear the words, due to some acoustical quirk. As with the marathon venery just completed, I could hear the action in almost baroque detail but the speech stayed muffled and indistinct, so I got the impression of shuffling angry feet, chairs wrenched around impatiently, banged doors, and voices rising in rage uttering words I was only partly able to comprehend. The male’s voice was dominant—a husky and furious baritone that all but drowned out the limpid Beethoven. By contrast the voice of the female seemed plaintive, defensive, growing shrill at moments as if in fright but generally submissive with an undertone of pleading. Suddenly a glass or china object—an ashtray, a tumbler, I knew not what—crashed and shattered against a wall, and I could hear the heavy male feet stamping toward the door, which flew open in the upstairs hallway. Then the door went shut with a tremendous clatter, and I heard the man’s footsteps tramping off into one of the other second-floor rooms. Finally the room was left—after these last twenty minutes of delirious activity—in what might be termed provisional silence, amid the depths of which I could hear only the soft heartsick adagio scratching on the phonograph, and the woman’s broken sobs on the bed above me.
I have always been a discriminating but light eater, and never sit down to breakfast. Being also by habit a late riser, I await the joys of “brunch.” After the noise subsided above, I saw that it was past noon and at the same time realized that both the fornication and the fracas had in some urgent, vicarious way made me incredibly hungry, as if I had actually partaken in whatever had taken place up there. I was so hungry that I had begun to salivate, and felt a touch of vertigo. Except for Nescafé and beer, I had not yet stocked either my cupboard or my minuscule refrigerator, so I decided to go out to lunch. During an earlier stroll through the neighborhood there had been a kosher restaurant, Herzl’s, on Church Avenue which had caught my eye. I wanted to go there because I had never before tried authentic, that is to say echt, Jewish cuisine and also because—well, When in Flatbush... I said to myself. I shouldn’t have bothered, for of course, this being the Sabbath, the place was closed, and I settled on another, presumably non-Orthodox restaurant further down the avenue named Sammy’s, where I ordered chicken soup with matzoh balls, gefilte fish and chopped liver—these familiar to me as an offshoot of wide reading in Jewish lore—from a waiter so monumentally insolent that I thought he was putting on an act. (I hadn’t then known that surliness among Jewish waiters was almost a definitive trait.) I was not particularly bothered, however. The place was crowded with people, most of them elderly, spooning their borscht and munching at potato pirogen; and a great noise of Yiddish—a venerable roar—filled the dank and redolent air with unfathomable gutturals, as of many wattled old throats gargling on chicken fat.
I felt curiously happy, very much in my element. Enjoy, enjoy, Stingo, I said to myself. Like numerous Southerners of a certain background, learning and sensibility, I have from the very beginning responded warmly to Jews, my first love having been Miriam Bookbinder, the daughter of a local ship chandler, who even at the age of six wore in her lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race; and then later I experienced a grander empathy with Jewish folk which, I am persuaded, is chiefly available to those Southerners shattered for years and years by rock-hard encounter with the anguish of Abraham and Moses’ stupendous quest and the Psalmist’s troubled hosannas and the abyssal vision of Daniel and all the other revelations, bittersweet confections, tall tales and beguiling horrors of the Protestant/Jewish Bible. In addition, it is a platitude by now that the Jew has found considerable fellowship among white Southerners because Southerners have possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb. In any case, sitting there that lunchtime at Sammy’s I positively glowed in my new environment, as it dawned on me with no surprise at all that an unconscious urge to be among Jews was at least part of the reason for my migration to Brooklyn. Certainly I could not be more deep in the heart of Jewry had I just been set down in Tel Aviv. And leaving the restaurant, I even confessed to myself a liking for Manischewitz, which in fact was lousy as an accompaniment to gefilte fish but bore a syrupy resemblance to the sweet scuppernong wine I had known as a boy in Virginia.
As I wandered back to Yetta’s house I was a bit upset once more by the happening in the room above me. My concern was largely selfish, for I knew that if such a thing went on too often, I would get little sleep or peace. Another part that bothered me, though, was the strange quality of the event—the jolly athletic amour so obviously and exquisitely enjoyed, yet followed by the precipitous slide into rage, weeping and discontent. Then, too, what further got my goat was the matter of who was doing it to whom. I was irked that I should be thrust into this position of lubricious curiosity, that my introduction to any of my fellow tenants should not be anything so ordinary as a “Hi” and a straightforward handshake but an episode of pornographic eavesdropping upon two strangers whose faces I had never even seen. Despite the fantasy life I have described myself as having led so far during the course of my stay in the metropolis, I am not by nature a snoop; but the very proximity of the two lovers—after all, they had nearly come down on my head—made it impossible for me to avoid trying to discover their identity, and at the earliest feasible moment.
My problem was almost immediately solved when I met my first of Yetta’s tenants, who was standing in the downstairs hallway, going through the mail which the postman had left on a table near the entrance. He was an amorphously fleshed, slope-shouldered, rather ovoid-looking young man of about twenty-eight, with kinky brick-colored hair and that sullen brusqueness of manner of the New York indigene. During my first days in the city I thought it a manner so needlessly hostile that I was driven several times to acts of near-violence, until I came to realize that it was only one aspect of that tough carapace that urban beings draw about themselves, like an armadillo’s hide. I introduced myself politely—“Stingo’s the name”—while my fellow roomer thumbed through the mail, and for my pains, got the sound of steady adenoidal breathing. I felt a hot flash at the back of my neck, went numb around the lips, and wheeled about toward my room.
Then I heard him say, “This yours?” And as I turned he was holding up a letter. I could tell from the handwriting that it was from my father.
“Thanks,” I murmured in rage, grabbing the letter.
“You mind savin’ me the stamp?” he said. “I collect commemoratives.” He essayed something in the nature of a grin, not expansive but recognizably human. I made a humming noise and gave him a vaguely positive look.
“I’m Fink,” he said, “Morris Fink. I more or less take care of this place, especially when Yetta’s away, like she is this weekend. She went to visit her daughter in Canarsie.” He nodded in the direction of my door. “I see you got to live in the crater.”
“The crater?” I said.
“I lived there up until a week ago. When I moved out that’s how you got to move in. I called it the crater because it was like livin’ in a bomb crater with all that humpin’ they were doin’ in that room up above.”
There had been suddenly established a bond between Morris and me, and I relaxed, filled with inquisitive zeal. “How did you put up with it, for God’s sake? And tell me—who the hell are they?”
“It’s not so bad if you get them to move the bed. They do that—move it over toward the wall—and you can barely hear them humpin’. Then it’s over the bathroom. I got them to do that. Or him, that is. I got him to move it even though it’s her room. I insisted. I said Yetta would throw them both out if he didn’t, so he finally agreed. Now I guess he’s moved it back toward the window. He said something about it bein’ cooler there.” He paused to accept one of the cigarettes I had offered him. “What you should do is ask him to move the bed back toward the wall again.”
“I can’t do that,” I put in, “I just can’t go up to some guy, some stranger, and say—well, you know what I’d have to say to him. It would be terribly embarrassing. I just couldn’t. And which ones are they, anyway?”
“I’ll tell him if you’d like,” said Morris, with an air of assurance that I found appealing. “I’ll make him do it. Yetta can’t stand it around here if people annoy each other. That Landau is a weird one, all right, and he might give me some trouble, but he’ll move the bed, don’t you worry. He doesn’t want to get thrown out on his ass.”
So it was Nathan Landau, the first name on my list, who I realized was the master of this setup; then who was his partner in all that din, sin and confusion? “And the gal?” I inquired. “Miss Grossman?”
“No. Grossman’s a pig. It’s the Polish broad, Sophie. Sophie Z., I call her. Her last name, it’s impossible to pronounce. But she’s some dish, that Sophie.”
I was aware once more of the silence of the house, the eerie impression I was to get from time to time that summer of a dwelling far removed from the city streets, of a place remote, isolated, almost bucolic. Children called from the park across the way and I heard a single car pass by slowly, its sound unhurried, inoffensive. I simply could not believe I was living in Brooklyn. “Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Well, let me tell you something,” said Morris. “Except maybe for Nathan, nobody in this joint has enough money to really do anything. Like go to New York and dance at the Rainbow Room or anything fancy like that. But on Saturday afternoon they all clear out of here. They all go somewhere. For instance, the Grossman pig—boy, is she some fuckin’ yenta—Grossman goes to visit her mother out in Islip. Ditto Astrid. That’s Astrid Weinstein, lives right there across the hall from you. She’s a nurse at Kings County Hospital like Grossman, only she’s no pig. A nice kid, but I would say not exactly a knockout. Plain. A dog, really. But not a pig.”
My heart sank. “And she goes to see her mother, too?” I said with scant interest.
“Yeah, she goes to see her mother, only in New York. I can somehow tell you’re not Jewish, so let me tell you something about Jewish people. They very often have to go see their mothers. It’s a trait.”
“I see,” I said. “And the others? Where have they gone?”
“Muskatblit—you’ll see him, he’s big and fat and a rabbinical student—Moishe goes to see his mother and his father, somewhere in Jersey. Only he can’t travel on the Sabbath, so he leaves here Friday night. He’s a big movie fiend, so Sunday he spends all day in New York goin’ to four or five movies. Then he gets back here late Sunday night half blind from goin’ to all those movies.”
“And, ah—Sophie and Nathan? Where do they go? And what do they do, by the way, aside from—” I was on the verge of an obvious jest but held my tongue, a point lost in any case, since Morris, so garrulous, so fluently and freely informative, had anticipated what I had been wondering and was rapidly filling me in.
“Nathan’s got an education, he’s a biologist. He works in a laboratory near Borough Hall where they make medicine and drugs and things like that. Sophie Z., I don’t know what she does exactly. I heard she’s some kind of receptionist for a Polish doctor who’s got a whole lot of Polish clients. Naturally, she speaks Polish like a native. Anyway, Nathan and Sophie are beach nuts. When the weather’s good, like now, they go to Coney Island—sometimes Jones Beach. Then they come back here.” He paused and made what seemed to approximate a leer. “They come back here and hump and fight. Boy, do they fight! Then they go out to dinner. They’re very big on good eating. That Nathan, he makes good money, but he’s a weird one, all right. Weird. Real weird. Like, I think he needs psychiatric consultation.”
A phone rang, and Morris let it ring. It was a pay phone attached to the wall, and its ring seemed exceptionally loud, until I realized that it must have been adjusted in such a way as to be heard all over the house. “I don’t answer it when nobody’s here,” Morris said. “I can’t stand that miserable fuckin’ phone, all those messages. ‘Is Lillian there? This is her mother. Tell her she forgot the precious gift her Uncle Bennie brought her.’ Yatata yatata. The pig. Or, ‘This is the father of Moishe Muskatblit. He’s not in? Tell him his cousin Max got run down by a truck in Hackensack.’ Yatata yatata all day long. I can’t stand that telephone.”
I told Morris that I would see him again, and after a few more pleasantries, retired to my room’s nursery-pink and the disquietude that it had begun to cause me. I sat down at my table. The first page of the legal pad, its blankness still intimidating, yawned in front of me like a yellowish glimpse of eternity. How in God’s name would I ever be able to write a novel? I mused, chewing on a Venus Velvet. I opened the letter from my father. I always looked forward to these letters, feeling fortunate to have this Southern Lord Chesterfield as an advisor, who so delighted me with his old-fashioned disquisitions upon pride and avarice and ambition, bigotry, political skulduggery, venereal excess and other mortal sins and dangers. Sententious he might occasionally be, but never pompous, never preacherish in tone, and I relished both the letters’ complexity of thought and feeling and their simple eloquence; whenever I finished one I was usually close to tears, or doubled over with laughter, and they almost always set me immediately to rereading passages in the Bible, from which my father had derived many of his prose cadences and much of his wisdom. Today, though, my attention was first caught by a newspaper clipping which fluttered out from the folds of the letter. The headline of the clipping, which was from the local gazette in Virginia, so stunned and horrified me that I momentarily lost my breath and saw tiny pinpoints of light before my eyes.
It announced the death by suicide, at the age of twenty-two, of a beautiful girl with whom I had been hopelessly in love during several of the rocky years of my early adolescence. Her name was Maria (rhyming in the Southern fashion with “pariah”) Hunt, and at fifteen I had been so feverish in my infatuation for her that it seems in retrospect a small-scale madness. Talk about your lovesick fool, how I exemplified such a wretch! Maria Hunt! For if in the 1940s, long before the dawn of our liberation, the ancient chivalry still prevailed and the plastic June Allysons of a boy’s dreams were demigoddesses with whom one might at most, to use the sociologists’ odious idiom, “pet to climax,” I carried self-abnegation to its mad limit and with my beloved Maria did not even try to cop a feel, as they used to say in those days. Indeed, I did not do so much as place a kiss upon her heartlessly appetizing lips. This is not on the other hand to define our relationship as Platonic, for in my understanding of that word there is an element of the cerebral, and Maria was not at all bright. To which it must be added that in those days of the forty-eight states, when in terms of the quality of public education Harry Byrd’s Virginia was generally listed forty-ninth—after Arkansas, Mississippi and even Puerto Rico—the intellectual tang of the colloquy of two fifteen-year-olds is perhaps best left to the imagination. Never was ordinary conversation cleft by such hiatuses, such prolonged and unembarrassed moments of ruminant non-speech. Nonetheless, I had passionately but chastely adored her, adored her for such a simple-minded reason as that she was beautiful enough to wreck the heart, and now I discovered that she was dead. Maria Hunt was dead!
The advent of the Second World War and my involvement in it had caused Maria to fade out of my life, but she had been many times since in my wistful thoughts. She had killed herself by leaping from the window of a building, and I found to my astonishment that this had occurred only a few weeks before, in Manhattan. I later learned that she had lived around the corner from me, on Sixth Avenue. It was a sign of the city’s inhuman vastness that we had both dwelt for months in an area as compact as Greenwich Village without ever having encountered each other. With a wrench of pain so intense that it was almost like remorse, I pondered whether I might not have been able to save her, to prevent her from taking such a terrible course, had I only known of her existence in the city, and her whereabouts. Reading the article over and over again, I verged very close to a state of real upheaval, and found myself moaning aloud at this senseless story of young despair and loss. Why did she do it? One of the most poignant aspects of the account was that her body had for complicated and obscure reasons gone unidentified, had been buried in a pauper’s grave, and only after a matter of weeks had been disinterred and sent back for final burial in Virginia. I was sickened, nearly broken up by the awful tale—so much so that I abandoned for the rest of the day any idea of work, and recklessly sought a kind of solace in the beer I had stored in the refrigerator. Later I read this passage from my father’s letter:
In re the enclosed item, son, I naturally thought you would be more than interested, inasmuch as I remember how so terribly “keen” you were on young Maria Hunt six or seven years ago. I used to recall with great amusement how you would blush like a tomato at the mere mention of her name, now I can only reflect on that time with the greatest sorrow. We question the good Lord’s way in such a matter but always to no avail. As you certainly know, Maria Hunt came from a tragic household, Martin Hunt a near-alcoholic and always at loose ends, while Beatrice I’m afraid was pretty unremitting and cruel in her moral demands upon people, especially I am told Maria. One thing seems certain, and that is that there was a great deal of unresolved guilt and hatred pervading that sad home. I know you will be affected by this news. Maria was, I remember, a truly lustrous young beauty, which makes it all the worse. Take some comfort from the fact that such beauty was with us for a time...
I brooded over Maria all afternoon, until the shadows lengthened beneath the trees around the park and the children fled homeward, leaving the paths that crisscrossed the Parade Grounds deserted and still. Finally I felt woozy from the beer, my mouth was raw and dry from too many cigarettes, and I lay down on my bed. I soon fell into a heavy sleep that was more than ordinarily invaded by dreams. One of the dreams besieged me, nearly ruined me. Following several pointless little extravaganzas, a ghastly but brief nightmare, and an expertly constructed one-act play, I was overtaken by the most ferociously erotic hallucination I had ever experienced. For now in some sunlit and serene pasture of the Tidewater, a secluded place hemmed around by undulant oak trees, my departed Maria was standing before me, with the abandon of a strumpet stripping down to the flesh—she who had never removed in my presence so much as her bobbysocks. Naked, peach-ripe, chestnut hair flowing across her creamy breasts, desirable beyond utterance, she approached me where I lay stiff as a dagger, importuning me with words delectably raunchy and lewd. “Stingo,” she murmured. “Oh, Stingo, fuck me.” A faint mist of perspiration clung to her skin like aphrodisia, little blisters of sweat adorned the dark hair of her mound. She wiggled toward me, a wanton nymph with moist and parted mouth, and now bending down over my bare belly, crooning her glorious obscenities, prepared to take between those lips unkissed by my own the bone-rigid stalk of my passion. Then the film jammed in the projector. I woke up in dire distress, staring at a pink ceiling stained with the shadows of the oncoming night, and let out a primeval groan—more nearly a howl—wrenched from the nethermost dungeons of my soul.
But then I felt another nail amplify my crucifixion: they were going at it again upstairs on the accursed mattress. “Stop it!” I roared at the ceiling, and with my forefingers plugged up my ears. Sophie and Nathan! I thought. Fucking Jewish rabbits! Although they might have let up for a brief time, when I listened once more they were still in action—no riotous sport this go-round, however, and no cries or arias, only the bedsprings making a decorous rhythmical twanging—laconic, measured, almost elderly. I did not care that they had slowed down their pace. I hurried—truly raced—outside into the dusk and walked distractedly around the perimeter of the park. Then I began to stroll more slowly along, growing reflective. Walking underneath the trees, I began seriously to wonder if I had not made a grave mistake in coming to Brooklyn. It really was not my element, after all. There was something subtly and inexplicably wrong, and had I been able to use a turn of phrase current some years later, I might have said that Yetta’s house gave off bad vibrations. I was still shaken by that unmerciful, lascivious dream. By their very nature dreams are, of course, difficult of access through memory, but a few are forever imprinted on the brain. With me the most memorable of dreams, the ones that have achieved that haunting reality so intense as to be seemingly bound up in the metaphysical, have dealt with either sex or death. Thus Maria Hunt. No dream had produced in me that lasting reverberation since the morning nearly eight years before, soon after my mother’s burial, when, struggling up from the seaweed-depths of a nightmare, I dreamed I peered out the window of the room at home in which I was still sleeping and caught sight of the open coffin down in the windswept, drenched garden, then saw my mother’s shrunken, cancer-ravaged face twist toward me in the satin vault and gaze at me beseechingly through eyes filmed over with indescribable torture.
I turned back toward the house. I thought I would go and sit down and reply to my father’s letter. I wanted to ask him to tell me in greater detail the circumstances of Maria’s death—probably not knowing at the time, however, that my subconscious was already beginning to grapple with that death as the germinal idea for the novel so lamentably hanging fire on my writing table. But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence. But I must confess that at first, certainly one of them was her distant but real resemblance to Maria Hunt. And what is still ineffaceable about my first glimpse of her is not simply the lovely simulacrum she seemed to me of the dead girl but the despair on her face worn as Maria surely must have worn it, along with the premonitory, grieving shadows of someone hurtling headlong toward death.
At the house Sophie and Nathan were embroiled in combat just outside the door of my room. I heard their voices clear on the summer night, and saw them battling in the hallway as I walked up the front steps.
“Don’t give me any of that, you hear,” I heard him yell.
“You’re a liar! You’re a miserable lying cunt, do you hear me? A cunt!”
“You’re a cunt too,” I heard her throw back at him. “Yes, you’re a cunt, I think.” Her tone lacked aggressiveness.
“I am not a cunt,” he roared. “I can’t be a cunt, you dumb fucking Polack. When are you going to learn to speak the language? A prick I might be, but not a cunt, you moron. Don’t you ever call me that again, you hear? Not that you’ll ever get a chance.”
“You called me that!”
“But that’s what you are, you moron—a two-timing, double-crossing cunt! Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor. Oh God!” he howled, and his voice rose in wild uncontained rage. “Let me out of here before I murder you—you whore! You were born a whore and you’ll die a whore!”
“Nathan, listen...” I heard her plead. And now as I approached closer to the front door I saw the two of them pressed together, defined in obscure relief against the pink hallway where a dangling forty-watt lightbulb, nearly engulfed by a cloud of fluttering moths, cast its palsied chiaroscuro. Dominating the scene by his height and force was Nathan: broad-shouldered, powerful-looking, crowned with a shock of hair swarthy as a Sioux’s, he resembled a more attenuated and frenetic John Garfield, with Garfield’s handsome, crookedly agreeable face—theoretically agreeable, I should say, for now the face was murky with passion and rage, was quite emphatically anything but agreeable, suffused as it was with such an obvious eagerness for violence. He wore a light sweater and slacks and appeared to be in his late twenties. He held Sophie’s arm tight in his grasp, and she flinched before his onslaught like a rosebud quivering in a windstorm. Sophie I could barely see in the dismal light. I was able to discern only her disheveled mane of straw-colored hair and, behind Nathan’s shoulder, about a third of her face. This included a frightened eyebrow, a small mole, a hazel eye, and a broad, lovely swerve of Slavic cheekbone across which a single tear rolled like a drop of quicksilver. She had begun to sob like a bereft child. “Nathan, you must listen, please,” she was saying between sobs. “Nathan! Nathan! Nathan! I’m sorry I called you that.”
He thrust her arm down abruptly and drew back from her. “You fill me with in-fin-ite revulsion,” he shouted. “Pure un-a-dul-ter-a-ted loathing. I’m getting out of here before I murder you!” He wheeled away from her.
“Nathan, don’t go!” she implored him desperately and reached out to him with both hands. “I need you, Nathan. You need me.” There was something plaintive, childlike in her voice, which was light in timbre, almost fragile, breaking a little in the upper register and of a faint huskiness lower down. The Polish accent overlaying it all made it charming or, I thought, would have made it so under less horrible circumstances. “Please don’t go, Nathan,” she cried. “We need each other. Don’t go!”
“Need?” he retorted, turning back toward her. “Me need you? Let me tell you something”—and here he began to shake his entire outstretched hand at her, as his voice grew more outraged and unstrung—“I need you like any goddamned insufferable disease I can name. I need you like a case of anthrax, hear me. Like trichinosis! I need you like a biliary calculus. Pellagra! Encephalitis! Bright’s disease, for Christ’s sake! Carcinoma of the fucking brain, you fucking miserable whore! Aaaahooooo-o-o!” This last was a rising, wavering wail—a spine-chilling sound that mingled fury with lamentation in a way that seemed almost liturgical, like the keening of a maddened rabbi. “I need you like death,” he bellowed in a choked voice. “Death!”
Once more he turned away, and again she said, weeping, “Please don’t go, Nathan!” Then, “Nathan, where are you going?”
He was near the door now, barely two feet away from me where I stood at the threshold, irresolute, not knowing whether to forge on toward my room or to turn and flee. “Going?” he shouted. “I’ll tell you where I’m going—I’m going to get on the first subway train and go to Forest Hills! I’m going to borrow my brother’s car and come back here and load up my things in the car. Then I’m going to clear out of this place.” All of a sudden his voice diminished in volume, his manner became somewhat more collected, even casual, but his tone was dramatically, slyly threatening. “After that, maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit down and write a registered letter to the Immigration Service. I’m going to tell them that you’ve got the wrong visa. I’m going to tell them that they should issue you a whore’s visa, if they’ve got one. If they don’t, I’m going to tell them they’d better ship you back to Poland for peddling your ass to any doctor in Brooklyn that wants a quick lay. Back to Cracow, baby!” He gave a satisfied chuckle. “Oh, baby, back to Cracow!”
He turned and plunged out the door. As he did so he brushed against me, and this caused him to whirl about again and draw up short. I could not tell whether he thought I had overheard him or not. Clearly winded, he was panting heavily and he eyed me up and down for a moment. Then I felt that he thought I had overheard, but it didn’t matter. Considering his emotional state, I was surprised at his way with me, which if not exactly gracious seemed at least momentarily civil, as if I had been magnanimously excluded from the territory of his rage.
“You the new roomer Fink told me about?” he managed between breaths.
I answered in the feeblest, briefest affirmative.
“You’re from the South,” he said. “Morris told me you were from the South. Said your name’s Stingo. Yetta needs a Southerner in her house to fit in with all the other funnies.” He sent a dark glance back toward Sophie, then looked at me and said, “Too bad I won’t be around for a lively conversation, but I’m getting out of here. It would have been nice to talk with you.” And here his tone became faintly ominous, the forced civility tapering off into the baldest sarcasm I had heard in a long time. “We’d have had great fun, shootin’ the shit, you and I. We could have talked about sports. I mean Southern sports. Like lynching niggers—or coons, I think you call them down there. Or culture. We could have talked about Southern culture, and maybe could have sat around here at old Yetta’s listening to hillbilly records. You know, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff and all those other standard bearers of classical Southern culture.” He had been scowling as he spoke, but now a smile parted his dark, troubled face and before I knew it he had reached out and clasped my unwilling hand in a firm handshake. “Ah well, that’s what could have been. Too bad. Old Nathan’s got to hit the road. Maybe in another life, Cracker, we’ll get together. So long, Cracker! See you in another life.”
And then, before my lips could part to utter protest or counter with an outraged sally or insult, Nathan had turned and pounded down the steps to the sidewalk, where his hard leather heels made a demonic clack-clack-clack as the sound receded, then faded out beneath the darkening trees, in the direction of the subway.
It is a commonplace that small cataclysms—an automobile accident, a stalled elevator, a violent assault witnessed by others—bring out an unnatural communicativeness among total strangers. After Nathan had disappeared into the night, I approached Sophie without hesitation. I had no idea what I was about to say—doubtless some gauche words of comfort—but it was she who spoke first, behind hands clenched to a tear-stained face. “It is so unfair of him,” she sobbed. “Oh, I love him so!”
I did the clumsy thing they often do in movies at such a point, when dialogue is a problem. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and silently gave it to her. She took it readily and began to mop at her eyes. “Oh, I love him so much!” she exclaimed. “So much! So much! I’ll die without him.”
“There, there,” I said, or something equally awful.
Her eyes implored me—I whom she had never before laid eyes on—with the despairing plea of an innocent prisoner protesting her virtue before the bar. I’m no whore, your honor, she seemed to be trying to say. I was flabbergasted both by her candor and her passion. “It is so unfair of him,” she said again. “To say that! He is the only man I have ever made love to, except my husband. And my husband’s dead!” And she was shaken by more sobs, and more tears poured forth, turning my handkerchief into a wet little monogrammed sponge. Her nose was swollen with grief and the pink tear stains marred her extraordinary beauty, but not so much that the beauty itself (including the mole, felicitously placed near the left eye, like a tiny satellite) failed to melt me on the spot—a distinct feeling of liquefaction emanating not from the heart’s region but, amazingly, from that of the stomach, which began to churn as if in revolt from a prolonged fast. I hungered so deeply to put my arms around her, to soothe her, that it became pure discomfort, but a cluster of oddly assorted inhibitions caused me to hold back. Also, I would be a liar if I did not confess that through all this there rapidly expanded in my mind a strictly self-serving scheme, which was that somehow, God granting me the luck and strength, I would take over this flaxen Polish treasure where Nathan, the thankless swine, had left off.
Then a tingling sensation in the small of my back made me realize that Nathan was behind us again, standing on the front steps. I wheeled about. He had managed to return in phantasmal silence and now glared at the two of us with a malevolent gleam, leaning forward with one arm outstretched against the frame of the door. “And one last thing,” he said to Sophie in a flat hard voice. “One other last thing, whore. The records. The record albums. The Beethoven. The Handel. The Mozart. All of them. I don’t want to have to lay eyes on you again. So take the records—take the records out of your room and put them in my room, on the chair by the door. The Brahms you can keep only because Blackstock gave it to you. Keep it, see? The rest of them I want, so make sure you put them where I tell you. If you don’t, when I come back here to pack up I’ll break your arms, both of them.” After a pause, he inhaled deeply and whispered, “So help me God, I’ll break your fucking arms!”
Then this time he was gone for good, moving in loose-limbed strides back to the sidewalk and quickly losing himself in the darkness.
Having no more tears to shed for the moment, Sophie slowly composed herself. “Thank you, you were kind,” she said to me softly, in the stuffed-head-cold tones of one who has wept copiously and long. She stretched out her hand and pressed into my own the handkerchief, a soggy wad. As she did so I saw for the first time the number tattooed on the suntanned, lightly freckled skin of her forearm—a purple number of at least five digits, too small to read in this light but graven, I could tell, with exactitude and craft. To the melting love in my stomach was added a sudden ache, and with an involuntary motion that was quite inexplicable (for one brought up to mind where he put his hands) I gently grasped her wrist, looking more closely at the tattoo. Even at that instant I knew my curiosity might be offensive, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Where were you?” I said.
She spoke a fibrous name in Polish, which I understood, barely, to be “Oświȩcim.” Then she said, “I was there for a long time. Longtemps.” She paused. “Vous voyez...” Another pause. “Do you speak French?” she said. “My English is very bad.”
“Un peu,” I replied, grossly exaggerating my facility. “It’s a little rusty.” Which meant that I had next to none.
“Rusty? What is rusty?”
“Sale” I tried recklessly.
“Dirty French?” she said, with the faintest whisper of a smile. After a moment she asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Which did not even draw from me a “Nein.”
“Oh, forget it,” I said. “You speak good English.” Then after a moment’s silence I said, “That Nathan! I’ve never seen anything like him in my life. I know it’s not my business, but—but he must be nuts! How can he talk like that to anyone? If you ask me, you’re well rid of him.”
She shut her eyes tightly and pursed her lips in pain, as if in recollection of all that had just transpired. “Oh, he’s right about so much,” she whispered. “Not about I wasn’t faithful. I don’t mean that. I have been faithful to him always. But other things. When he said I didn’t dress right. Or when he said I was a sloppy Pole and didn’t clean up. Then he called me a dirty Polack, and I knew that I... yes, deserved it. Or when he took me to these nice restaurants and I always keeped...” She questioned me with her gaze.
“Kept,” I said. Without overdoing it, I will from time to time have to try to duplicate the delicious inaccuracies of Sophie’s English. Her command was certainly more than adequate and—for me, anyway—actually enhanced by her small stumbles in the thickets of syntax, especially upon the snags of our grisly irregular verbs. “Kept what?” I asked.
“Kept the carte, the menu I mean. I so often would keep the menu, put it in my bag for a souvenir. He said a menu cost money, that I was stealing. He was right about that, you know.”
‘Taking a menu doesn’t exactly seem like grand larceny to me, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Look, again I know it’s none of my business, but—”
Clearly determined to resist my attempts to help restore her self-esteem, she interrupted me, saying, “No, I know it was wrong. What he said was true, I done so many things that were wrong. I deserved it, that he leave me. But I was never unfaithful to him. Never! Oh, I’ll just die now, without him! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
For a moment I was afraid that she might soar off on another little mad fugue of grief, but she gave only a single hoarse gulping sob, like some final punctuation mark, then turned away from me. “You’ve been kind,” she said. “Now I must go up to my room.”
As she went slowly up the stairs I took a good look at her body in its clinging silk summer dress. While it was a beautiful body, with all the right prominences, curves, continuities and symmetries, there was something a little strange about it—nothing visibly missing and not so much deficient as reassembled. And that was precisely it, I could see. The odd quality proclaimed itself through the skin. It possessed the sickish plasticity (at the back of her arms it was especially noticeable) of one who has suffered severe emaciation and whose flesh is even now in the last stages of being restored. Also, I felt that underneath that healthy suntan there lingered the sallowness of a body not wholly rescued from a terrible crisis. But none of these at all diminished a kind of wonderfully negligent sexuality having to do at that moment, at least, with the casual but forthright way her pelvis moved and with her truly sumptuous rear end. Despite past famine, her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with magical eloquence, and from this angle it so stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter of my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass’s brief lodging—thirty seconds would do—within the compass of my cupped, supplicant palms. Old Stingo, I mused as she climbed upward, there must be some perversity in this dorsal fixation. Then as she reached the top of the stairs she turned, looking down, and smiled the saddest smile imaginable. “I hope I haven’t annoyed you with my problems,” she said. “I am so sorry.” And she moved toward her room and said, “Good night.”
So then, from the only comfortable chair in my room, where I sat reading Aristophanes that night, I was able to see a section of the upstairs hallway through my partly open door. Once around midevening I saw Sophie take to his room the record albums which Nathan had commanded her to return to him. On her way back I could see that again she was crying. How could she go on so? Where did those tears come from? Later she played over and over on the phonograph the final movement of that First Symphony of Brahms which he so big-heartedly had allowed her to keep. It must have been her only album now. All evening that music filtered down through the paper-thin ceiling, the lordly and tragic French horn mingling in my head with the flute’s antiphonal, piercing birdcall to fill my spirit with a sadness and nostalgia almost more intense than any I had ever felt before. I thought of the moment of that music’s creation. It was music that, among other things, spoke of a Europe of a halcyon time, bathed in the soft umber glow of serene twilights—of children in pigtails and pinafores bobbing along in dogcarts, of excursions in the glades of the Wiener Wald and strong Bavarian beer, of ladies from Grenoble with parasols strolling the glittering rims of glaciers in the high Alps, and balloon voyages, of gaiety, of vertiginous waltzes, of Moselle wine, of Johannes Brahms himself, with beard and black cigar, contemplating his titanic chords beneath the leafless, autumnal beech trees of the Hofgarten. It was a Europe of almost inconceivable sweetness—a Europe that Sophie, drowning in her sorrow above me, could never have known.
When I went to bed the music was still playing. And when each of the scratchy shellac records reached its end, allowing me in the interval before the next to hear Sophie’s inconsolable weeping, I tossed and turned and wondered again how one mortal human being could be the vessel to contain such grief. It seemed nearly impossible that Nathan could inspire this raw, devastating woe. But clearly he had done so, and this posed for me a problem. For if, as I have said, I felt myself slipping already into that sick and unfortified situation known as love, wasn’t it foolish of me to expect to win the affection, much less to share the bed, of one so dislodgeably attached to the memory of her lover? There was something actually indecent about the idea, like laying siege to a recently bereaved widow. To be sure, Nathan was out of the way, but wasn’t it vain of me to expect to fill the vacuum? For one thing, I remembered I had so little money. Even if I broke through the barrier of her grief, how could I expect to woo this ex-starveling with her taste for fancy restaurants and expensive phonograph records?
Finally the music stopped and she stopped weeping too, while the restless creak of springs told me she had gone to bed. I lay there for a long time awake, listening to the soft night-sounds of Brooklyn—a far-off howling dog, a passing car, a burst of gentle laughter from a woman and a man at the edge of the park. I thought of Virginia, of home. I drifted off to sleep, but slept uneasily, indeed chaotically, once waking in the unfamiliar darkness to find myself very close to some droll phallic penetration—through folds, or a hem, or a damp wrinkle—of my displaced pillow. Then again I fell asleep, only to wake with a start just before dawn, in the dead silence of the hour, with pounding heart and an icy chill staring straight up at my ceiling above which Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer’s fierce clarity that she was doomed.