THE WEATHER WAS generally fine that summer, but sometimes the evenings got hot and steamy, and when this happened Nathan and Sophie and I often went around the corner on Church Avenue to an air-conditioned “cocktail lounge”—God, what a description!—called the Maple Court. There were relatively few full-fledged bars in that part of Flatbush (a puzzlement to me until Nathan pointed out that serious tippling does not rank high among Jewish pastimes), but this bar of ours did do a moderately brisk business, numbering among its predominately bluecollar clientele Irish doormen, Scandinavian cabdrivers, German building superintendents and WASPs of indeterminate status like myself who had somehow strayed into the faubourg. There was also what appeared to me a small sprinkling of Jews, some looking a little furtive. The Maple Court was large, ill-lit and on the seedy side, with the faint pervasive odor of stagnant water, but the three of us were attracted there on especially sultry summer nights by the refrigerated air and by the fact that we had grown rather to like its down-at-the-heel easygoingness. It was also cheap and beer was still ten cents a glass. I learned that the bar had been built in 1933, to celebrate and capitalize upon the repeal of Prohibition, and its spacious, even somewhat cavernous dimensions were originally meant to encompass a dance floor. Such Corybantic revels as envisioned by the first owners never took place, however, since through some incredible oversight the raunchy entrepreneurs failed to realize that they had located their establishment in a neighborhood substantially as devoted to order and propriety as a community of Hard Shell Baptists or Mennonites. The synagogues said No, also the Dutch Reformed church.
Thus the Maple Court did not obtain a cabaret license, and all the bright angular chrome-and-gilt decor, including sunburst chandeliers meant to revolve above the giddy dancers like glittering confections in a Ruby Keeler movie, fell into disrepair and gathered a patina of grime and smoke. The raised platform which formed the hub of the oval-shaped bar, and which had been designed to enable sleek long-legged stripteasers to wiggle their behinds down upon a circumambience of lounging gawkers, became filled with dusty signs and bloated fake bottles advertising brands of whiskey and beer. And more sadly somehow, the big Art Deco mural against one wall—a fine period piece done by an expert hand, with the skyline of Manhattan and silhouettes of a jazz band and chorus girls kicking up their heels—never once faced out toward a swirl of jubilant dancers but grew cracked and water-blotched and acquired a long horizontal dingy streak where a generation of neighborhood drunks had propped the backs of their heads. It was just beneath a corner of this mural, in a remote part of the ill-starred dance floor, that Nathan and Sophie and I would sit on those muggy evenings in the Maple Court.
“I’m sorry you didn’t make out with Leslie, kid,” Nathan said to me one night after the debacle on Pierrepont Street. He was clearly both disappointed and a little surprised that his efforts at matchmaking had come to naught. “I thought you two were all locked in, made for each other. At Coney Island that day I thought she was going to eat you up. And now you tell me it all went flooey. What’s the matter? I can’t believe she wouldn’t put out.”
“Oh no, it was all right in the sex department,” I lied. “I mean, at least I got in.” For a variety of vague reasons I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth about our calamitous stand-off, this scratching match between two virgins. It was too disgraceful to dwell upon, both from Leslie’s point of view and my own. I plunged into a feeble fabrication, but I could tell that Nathan knew I had begun to improvise—his shoulders were shaking with laughter—and I finished my account with one or two Freudian furbelows, chief among them being one in which Leslie told me that she had been able to reach a climax only with large, muscular, coal-black Negroes with colossal penises. Smiling, Nathan began to regard me with the look of a man who is having his leg pulled in a chummy way, and when I was finished he put his hand on my shoulder and said in those understanding tones of an older brother, “Sorry about you and Leslie, kid, whatever happened. I thought she’d be a dreamboat. Sometimes the chemistry just isn’t right.”
We forgot about Leslie. I did most of the drinking these evenings, downing my half-dozen glasses of beer or so. Sometimes we went to the bar before dinner, often afterward. In those days it was almost unheard of to order wine in a bar—especially a tacky place like the Maple Court—but Nathan, in the vanguard about so many things, always managed to have served up a bottle of Chablis, which he kept cold in a bucket by the table and which would last him and Sophie the hour and a half we usually spent there. The Chablis never did more than get both of them mildly and pleasantly relaxed, signaled by a fine sheen welling up through his dark face and the tenderest dogwood-blossom flush on hers.
Nathan and Sophie were like an old married couple to me now, we were all inseparable; and I idly wondered if some of the more sophisticated of the Maple Court habitués did not regard us as a ménage à trois. Nathan was marvelous, bewitching, so perfectly “normal” and so delightful to be with that were it not for Sophie’s wretched little references (sometimes made inadvertently during our Prospect Park picnics) to terrible moments during their past year together, I would utterly have erased from memory that cataclysmic scene when I had first glimpsed them battling, along with other hints I had had of another, blacker side of his being. How could I do otherwise, in the presence of this electrifying, commanding character, part magic entertainer, part big brother, confidant and guru, who had so generously reached out to me in my isolation? Nathan was no cheap charmer. There was the depth of a masterful performer in even the slightest of his jokes, practically all of them Jewish, which he was able so inexhaustibly to disgorge. His major stories were masterpieces. Once as a boy sitting in the Tidewater Theatre with my father as we watched a W. C. Fields movie (I believe it was My Little Chickadee) I saw happen what was supposed to happen only as a figure of speech, or in cornball works of fiction: I saw my father caught up in a rapture of such mind-dissolving laughter that he slid completely out of his seat and into the aisle. Laid out, by God, in the aisle! I did nearly the same in the Maple Court bar as Nathan told what I always remember as his Jewish country club joke.
It is like watching not one but two separate performers when Nathan acts out this suburban folk tale. The first performer is Shapiro, who at a banquet is attempting to propose once more his perennially blackballed friend for membership. Nathan’s voice grows incomparably oleaginous, gross with fatuity and edged with just the perfect trace of Yiddish as he limns Shapiro’s quaveringly hopeful apostrophe to Max Tannenbaum. “To tell what a great human being Max Tannenbaum is I must use the entire English alphabet! From A to Z I will tell you about this beautiful man!” Nathan’s voice grows silky, sly. Shapiro knows that among the club members is one—now nodding and dozing—who will try to blackball Tannenbaum. Shapiro trusts that this enemy, Ginsberg, will not wake up. Nathan-Shapiro speaks: “A he is Admirable. B he is Beneficial. C he is Charming. D he is Delightful. E he is Educated. F he is Friendly. G he is Good-hearted. H he is a Helluva nice guy.” (Nathan’s stately, unctuous intonations are impeccable, the vapid slogans almost unbearably hilarious; the back of my throat aches from laughter, a film blurs my eyes.) “I he is Inna-resting.” At this point Ginsberg wakes up, Nathan’s forefinger furiously stabs the air, the voice becoming magisterial, arrogant, insufferably but gloriously hostile. Through Nathan, the terrible, the unbudgeable Ginsberg thunders: “J joost a minute! (Majestic pause) K he’s a Kike! L he’s a Lummox! M he’s a Moron! N he’s a Nayfish! O he’s an Ox! P he’s a Prick! Q he’s a Queer! R he’s a Red! S he’s a Shlemiel! T he’s a Tochis! U you can have him! V ve don’t want him! W X Y Z—I blackball the shmuck!”
It was a grand display of wizardry, Nathan’s production-inspired mockery of such outrageous, runaway, sublime silliness that I found myself emulating my father, gasping, shorn of strength, collapsing sideways on the greasy banquette. Sophie, half choked on her own mirth, made weak little dabs at her eyes. I sensed the local barflies regarding us glumly, wondering at our delirium. Recovering, I gazed at Nathan with something like awe. To be able to cause such laughter was a god’s gift, a benison.
But if Nathan had been merely a clown, had he remained so exhaustingly “on” at all times, he would have, of course, with all his winning gifts, become a staggering bore. He was too sensitive to play the perpetual comedian, and his interests were too wide-ranging and serious for him to permit our good times together to remain on the level of tomfoolery, however imaginative. I might add, too, that I always sensed that it was Nathan—perhaps again because of his “seniority,” or maybe because of the pure electric force of his presence—who set the tone of our conversation, although his innate tact and sense of proportion prevented him from hogging the stage. I was no slouch at storytelling, either, and he listened. He was, I suppose, what is considered a polymath—one who knows a great deal about almost everything; yet such was his warmth, his wit, and with such a light touch did he display his learning, that I never once felt in his presence that sense of gagging resentment one often feels when listening to a person of loquaciously large knowledge, who is often just an erudite ass. His range was astonishing and I had constantly to remind myself that I was talking to a scientist, a biologist (I kept thinking of a prodigy like Julian Huxley, whose essays I had read in college)—this man who possessed so many literary references and allusions, both classical and modern, and who within the space of an hour could, with no gratuitous strain, weave together Lytton Strachey, Alice in Wonderland, Martin Luther’s early celibacy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the mating habits of the Sumatran orangutan into a little jewel box of a beguiling lecture which facetiously but with a serious overtone explored the intertwined nature of sexual voyeurism and exhibitionism.
It all sounded very convincing to me. He was as brilliant on Dreiser as he was on Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Or the theme of suicide, about which he seemed to possess a certain preoccupation, and which he touched on more than once, though in a manner which skirted the purely morbid. The novel which he esteemed above all others, he said, was Madame Bovary, not alone because of its formal perfection but because of the resolution of the suicide motif; Emma’s death by self-poisoning seeming to be so beautifully inevitable as to become one of the supreme emblems, in Western literature, of the human condition. And once in an extravagant piece of waggery, speaking of reincarnation (about which he said he was not so skeptical as to rule it beyond possibility), he claimed to have been in a past life the only Jewish Albigensian monk—a brilliant friar named St. Nathan le Bon who had single-handedly promulgated that crazy sect’s obsessive penchant for self-destruction, which was based on the reasoning that if life is evil, it is necessary to hasten life’s end. “The only thing I hadn’t foreseen,” he observed, “is that I’d be brought back to live in the fucked-up twentieth century.”
Yet despite the mildly unsettling nature of this concern of his, I never felt during these effervescent evenings the slightest hint of the depression and cloudy despair in him which Sophie had alluded to, the violent seizures whose fury she had experienced firsthand. He was so much the embodiment of everything I deemed attractive and even envied in a human being that I couldn’t help but suspect that the somber side of her Polish imagination had dreamed up these intimations of strife and doom. Such, I reasoned, was the stock-in-trade of Polacks.
No, I felt he was essentially too gentle and solicitous to pose any such menace as she had hinted at. (Even though I knew of his ugly moods.) My book, for example, my flowering novel. I shall never forget that priceless, affectionate outpouring. In spite of his earlier remonstrances about Southern literature falling into desuetude, his brotherly concern for my work had been constant and encouraging. Once one morning during our coffee shmooz he asked if he might see some of the first pages I had written.
“Why not?” he urged with that swarthily intense and furrowed expression which so often caused his smile to resemble a benign scowl. “We’re friends. I won’t interfere, I won’t comment, I won’t even make any suggestions. I’d just love to see it.” I was terrified—terrified for the straightforward reason that not a single other soul had laid eyes on my much-thumbed stack of yellow pages with their smudged and rancid margins, and my respect for Nathan’s mind was so great that I knew that if he should show displeasure with my effort, however unintentionally, it would severely dampen my enthusiasm and even my further progress. Taking a gamble one night, however, and breaking a romantically noble resolution I had made not to let anyone look at the book until its final sentence, and then only Alfred A. Knopf in person, I gave him ninety pages or so, which he read at the Pink Palace while Sophie sat with me at the Maple Court, reminiscing about her childhood and Cracow. My heart went into a bumping erratic trot when Nathan, after perhaps an hour and a half, hustled in out of the night, brow bedewed with sweat, and sprawled down opposite me next to Sophie. His gaze was level, emotionless; I feared the worst. Stop! I was on the verge of pleading. You said you wouldn’t comment! But his judgment hung in the air like an imminent clap of thunder. “You’ve read Faulkner,” he said slowly, without inflection, “you’ve read Robert Penn Warren.” He paused. “I’m sure you’ve read Thomas Wolfe, and even Carson McCullers. I’m breaking my promise about no criticism.”
And I thought: Oh shit, he’s got my number, all right, it really is just a bunch of derivative trash. I wanted to sink through the chocolate-ripple and chrome-splotched tiles of the Maple Court and disappear among the rats into the sewers of Flatbush. I clenched my eyes shut—thinking: I never should have shown it to this con man, who is now going to give me a line about Jewish writing—and at the moment I did so, sweating and a trifle nauseated, I jumped as his big hands grasped my shoulders and his lips smeared my brow with a wet and sloppy kiss. I popped my eyes open, stupefied, almost feeling the warmth of his radiant smile. “Twenty-two years old!” he exclaimed. “And oh my God, you can write! Of course you’ve read those writers, you wouldn’t be able to write a book if you hadn’t. But you’ve absorbed them, kid, absorbed them and made them your own. You’ve got your own voice. That’s the most exciting hundred pages by an unknown writer anyone’s ever read. Give me more!” Sophie, infected by his exuberance, clutched Nathan’s arm and glowed like a madonna, gazing at me as if I were the author of War and Peace. I choked stupidly on an unshaped little cluster of words, nearly fainting with pleasure, happier, I think—at only small risk of hyperbole—than any single moment I could then remember in a life of memorable fulfillments, however basically undistinguished. And all the rest of the evening he made a glorious fuss over my book, firing me with all the vivid encouragement which, in the deepest part of me, I knew I had desperately needed. How could I have failed to have the most helpless crush on such a generous, mind-and-life-enlarging mentor, pal, savior, sorcerer? Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous.
July came, bringing varied weather—hot days, then oddly cool, damp days when the wanderers across the park muffled themselves in jackets and sweaters, finally several mornings at a stretch when thunderstorms grumbled and threatened but never broke. I thought that I could live there in Flatbush at Yetta’s Pink Palace forever, or certainly for the months and even years it would take to finish my masterpiece. It was hard to hold to my high-minded vows—I still fretted over the lamentably celibate nature of my existence; this aside, I felt that the routine I had established in company with Sophie and Nathan was as contented a daily state as any in which a budding writer could possibly find himself. Buoyed up by Nathan’s passionate assurance, I scribbled away like a fiend, constantly lulled by the knowledge that when the fatigue of my labors overtook me I could almost always find Sophie and Nathan, singly or together, somewhere nearby ready to share a confidence, a worry, a joke, a memory, Mozart, a sandwich, coffee, beer. With loneliness in abeyance and with my creative juices in full flow, I could not have been happier...
I could not have been happier, that is, until there came a bad sequence of events which intruded themselves on my well-being and made me realize how desperately at odds Sophie and Nathan had been (and still were) with each other, how unsimulated had been that quality in Sophie of foreboding and fright, together with the hints she had let fall of bitter discord. Then there was an even more sinister revelation. For the first time since the night of my arrival at Yetta’s house over a month before, I began to see seeping out of Nathan, almost like some visible poisonous exudate, his latent capacity for rage and disorder. And I also began gradually to understand how the turmoil that was grinding them to pieces had double origins, deriving perhaps equally from the black and tormented underside of Nathan’s nature and from the unrelinquished reality of Sophie’s immediate past, trailing its horrible smoke—as if from the very chimneys of Auschwitz—of anguish, confusion, self-deception and, above all, guilt...
I had been sitting one evening at around six o’clock at our usual table at the Maple Court, sipping a beer and reading the New York Post. I was awaiting Sophie—due at any moment after her day at Dr. Blackstock’s office—and Nathan, who had told me that morning over coffee that he would join us around seven, following what he knew would be an especially long, rugged day at his laboratory. I felt a little starched and formal sitting there, because I had on a clean shirt and tie and was wearing my suit for the first time since my misadventure with the Princess of Pierrepont Street. I was somewhat dismayed to discover a smear of Leslie’s lipstick, stale but still flamboyantly vermilion, on the inner edge of the lapel, but I had managed with a lot of spit and a certain readjustment to make the stain practically invisible, or enough so that my father would probably not notice. I was dressed this way because I was due to meet my father at Pennsylvania Station, where he was arriving by train from Virginia later on in the evening. I had received a letter from him only a week or so before in which he said he was planning to pay me a brief visit. His motive was sweet and patently uncomplicated: he said he missed me and since he hadn’t seen me in so long (I calculated it had been nine months or more) he wanted to reestablish, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, our mutual love and kinship. It was July, he had vacation time; he was coming up. There was something so infrangibly Southern, so old-fashioned about such a gesture that it was almost paleological, but it warmed my heart deeply, even beyond my very real affection for him.
Also, I knew it cost my father a great deal of emotional capital to venture into the great city, which he loathed utterly. His Southern hatred of New York was not the primitive, weirdly solipsistic hatred of the father of a college friend of mine from one of the more moistly paludal counties of South Carolina: this countryman’s refusal to visit New York was based on an apocalyptic and ever-haunting fantasy-scenario in which, seated at a Times Square cafeteria minding his own business, he finds the chair next to him preempted by a large, grinning, malodorous male Negro (politely or rudely preempted, it doesn’t matter; propinquity is the sole issue), whereupon he is forced to commit a felony through the necessity of seizing a Heinz Ketchup bottle and bashing it over the black bastard’s head. He then gets five years in Sing Sing. My father had less mad strictures about the city, though still intense ones. No such monstrous figment, no werewolf of race stalked the imagination of my father—a gentleman, a libertarian and a Jacksonian Democrat. He detested New York only for what he called its “barbarity,” its lack of courtesy, its total bankruptcy in the estimable domain of public manners. The snarling command of the traffic cop, the blaring insult of horns, all the needlessly raised voices of the night-denizens of Manhattan ravaged his nerves, acidified his duodenum, unhelmed his composure and his will. I wanted to see him very much, and was enormously touched that he would make the long trip north, endure the uproar and dare shoulder through the swarming, obstreperous and brutal human tides of the metropolis in order to visit his only offspring.
I waited a little restlessly for Sophie. Then my eyes lit upon something which totally captured my attention. On the third page of the Post that evening was an article, accompanied by a most unflattering photograph, concerning the notorious Mississippi race-baiter and demagogue, Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo. According to the story, Bilbo—whose face and utterances had saturated the media during the war years and those immediately following—had been admitted to the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans to undergo surgery for cancer of the mouth. One of the inferences that could be drawn from the piece was that Bilbo had left to him very little time. In the photograph he looked already a cadaver. Great irony in this, of course: “The Man” who had gained the loathing of “right-thinking” people everywhere, including the South, by his straightforward promiscuous public use of words like “nigger,” “coon,” “jigaboo,” contracting cancer in that symbolic portion of his anatomy. The petty tyrant from the piney woods who had called Mayor La Guardia of New York a “dago” and who had addressed a Jewish congressman as “Dear Kike” suffering a ripe carcinoma which would soon still that scurrilous jaw and evil tongue—it was all too much, and the Post laid on the irony with a dumptruck. After I read the piece, I gave a long sigh, thinking that I was awfully glad to see the old devil go. Of all those who had so foully tarnished the image of the modern South he was a leading mischief-maker, not really typical of Southern politicians but because of his blabbermouth and prominence rendering himself, in the eyes of the credulous and even not so credulous, an archetypal image of the Southern statesman and thus polluting the name of whatever was good and decent and even exemplary in the South as surely and as wickedly as those anonymous sub-anthropoids who had recently slaughtered Bobby Weed. I said to myself, again: Glad to see you go, you evil-spirited old sinner.
Yet even as the gentle brew took hold, softly marinating my senses, and I ruminated on Bilbo’s fate, I was overtaken by another emotion; I suppose it might be called regret—faint regret perhaps, yet regret. A lousy way to die, I thought. Cancer of that kind must be ghastly, those monstrous metastasizing cells so close to the brain—hideous little microscopic boll weevils invading cheek, sinuses, eye socket, jaw, filling the mouth with its fulminating virulence until the tongue, engulfed, rotted and fell dumb. I shuddered a little. Yet it was not simply this agonizing mortal blow which the senator had suffered that caused me my odd and vagrant pang. It was something else, abstract and remote, intangible yet worrisome to my spirit. I knew something about Bilbo—something more, that is, than was known by the ordinary American citizen with even a marginal concern with politics and doubtless more than the editors of the New York Post. Certainly my knowledge was not profound, but even in the superficiality of my understanding I felt there had been revealed to me facets of Bilbo’s character that gave the heft of flesh and the stink of real sweat to that shingle-flat cartoon of the daily press. What I knew about Bilbo was not even particularly redeeming—he would remain a first-class scoundrel until the tumor strangled off his breath or its excrescence flooded through the portals of his brain—but it had at least allowed me to perceive human bones and dimensions through the papier-mâché stock villain from Dixie.
In college—where, outside of “creative writing,” my only serious academic concern had been the study of the history of the American South—I had hacked out a lengthy term paper on that freakish and aborted political movement known as Populism, paying special attention to the Southern demagogues and rabble-rousers who had so often exemplified its seamier side. It was hardly a truly original paper, I recollect, but I put a great deal of thought and effort into its making, for a lad of twenty or so, and it earned me a glowing “A” at a time when “A’s” were hard to get. Drawing heavily on C. Vann Woodward’s brilliant study of Tom Watson of Georgia and concentrating on other hagridden folk heroes like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and James K. Vardaman and “Cotton Ed” Smith and Huey Long, I demonstrated how democratic idealism and honest concern for the common man were virtues which linked all these men together, at least in their early careers, along with a concomitant and highly vocal opposition to monopoly capitalism, industrial and business fat cats and “big money.” I then extrapolated from this proposition an argument to show how these men, basically decent and even visionary to begin with, were brought down by their own fatal weakness in face of the Southern racial tragedy; for each of them in the end, to one degree or another, was forced to play upon and exploit the poor-white rednecks’ ancient fear and hatred of the Negro in order to aggrandize what had degenerated into shabby ambition and lust for power.
Although I did not deal with Bilbo at any great length, I learned from my ancillary research (and rather to my surprise, given the truly despicable public image he projected in the 1940s) that he, too, fitted into this classically paradoxical mold; Bilbo in much the same way as the others had commenced with enlightened principles, and indeed like the others, I discovered, had as a public servant produced reforms and contributions that had greatly advanced the common weal. It all may not have been much—measured against his nauseous mouthings which would have caused the most hidebound Virginia reactionary to recoil—but it was something. One of the nastiest abettors of the hateful dogma purveyed below the Mason-Dixon line, he seemed to me also—while I brooded over the haggard figure in a baggy white Palm Beach suit, ravaged like one already seized by death’s hand even as he slouched past a frayed palm tree into the New Orleans clinic—one of its chief and most wretched victims, and the faintest breath of regret accompanied my murmured farewell. Suddenly, thinking of the South, thinking of Bilbo and once again of Bobby Weed, I was riven by a sharp blade of despondency. How long, Lord? I beseeched the begrimed and motionless chandeliers.
Just then I caught sight of Sophie at the instant she pushed open the grimy glass front door of the bar, where a slant of golden light somehow captured at exactly the right angle the lovely swerve of her cheekbone below the oval eyes with their sleepy-sullen hint of Asia, and the broad harmony of the rest of her face, including—or, I should say, especially—the fine, elongated, slightly uptilted “Polish schnoz,” as Nathan lovingly called it, which terminated in a nice little button. There were certain moments when through such a nonchalant gesture—opening a door, brushing her hair, throwing bread to the Prospect Park swans (it had something to do with motion, attitude, the tilt of head, a flow of arms, a swing of hips)—she created a continuum of beauty that was positively breath-taking. The tilt, the flow, the swing together made up an exquisite particularity that was nobody’s but Sophie’s, and yes, by God, it took the breath away. I mean this literally, for synchronous with the stunning effect she made on my eyes as she stood there arrested in the doorway—blinking at the gloom, her flaxen hair drenched in the evening gold—I listened to myself give a thin but quite audible and breathless half-hiccup. I was still moronically in love with her.
“Stingo, you’re all dressed up, where are you going, you’re wearing your cocksucker, you look so nice,” she said all in a tumbling rush, blushing crimson and correcting herself with a wonderful giggle even as I, too, formed the word seersucker! She giggled so much that, sitting down beside me, she buried her face on my shoulder. “Quelle horreur!”
“You’ve been hanging around Nathan too long,” I said, joining in her laughter. Her sexual idiom, I knew, was lifted entirely from Nathan. I had realized this since that moment when—describing some puritanical Cracovian town fathers who had endeavored to put a fig leaf on a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David—she had said they had wanted “to cover up his schlong.”
“Dirty words in English or Yiddish sound better than they do in Polish,” she said after she had recovered. “Do you know what the word for fuck in Polish is? It’s pierdolić. It just doesn’t have the same quality that the English word has. I like fuck much better.”
“I like fuck much better too.”
The drift of conversation made me both flustered and a little aroused (from Nathan she had also absorbed an innocent candor I was still unable to get used to), and so I managed to change the subject. I pretended nonchalance even though her presence still stirred me to the very pit of my stomach, inflamed me in a way that was all the more distracting because of the perfume she was wearing—the same herbal scent, distinctly unsubtle and loamy and provocative, which had stung my libidinal longings on that first day when we went to Coney Island. Now that perfume seemed to float up from between her breasts, which to my great surprise were most amply on show, appetizingly framed by her low-cut silk blouse. It was a new blouse, I was sure, and not really her style. During the weeks I had known her she had been aggravatingly conservative and low-keyed in her dress (aside from the flair for costumery she shared with Nathan, which was a different matter) and wore clothes clearly not calculated to focus eyes on her body, especially her upper torso; she was excessively demure even at a time in fashion when the womanly figure, badly depreciated, was rather down and out. I had seen her bosom browsing about beneath silk and cashmere and a nylon swimsuit but never with any definition. I could only theorize that this was some psychic extension of the prudish way she doubtless had to cloak herself in the rigid Catholic community of prewar Cracow, a practice she must have found hard to abandon. Also, to a lesser degree, I think she may not have wanted to expose to the world what had been wreaked upon her body by the privation of the past. Her dentures sometimes came loose. Her neck still had unbecoming little wrinkles, slack flesh pulled at the back of her arms.
But by now Nathan’s year-long campaign to restore her to health and plumpness had begun to pay off; at least it seemed that Sophie was beginning to think so, for she had liberated her slightly freckled, pretty demiglobes as openly as she could and remain a lady, and I glanced at them with enormous appreciation. All it took for boobs, I thought, was great American nutrition. They caused me slightly to shift my focus of erogenous dreamery away from the few glimpses I had had of her achingly desirable, harmoniously proportioned Elberta peach of a derriere. Now I soon discovered that she had gotten herself rigged out in these sexpot duds because it was to be a very special evening for Nathan. He was going to reveal something wonderful about his work to Sophie and me. It was going to be, said Sophie, quoting Nathan, “a bombshell.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“His work,” she replied, “his research. He told me he would say to us tonight about his discovery. They finally make what Nathan calls the breakthrough.”
“That’s marvelous,” I said, genuinely excited. “You mean this stuff he’s been so... mysterious about? He’s finally got it licked, is that what you mean?”
“That’s what he said, Stingo!” Her eyes were ashine. “He’s going to tell us tonight.”
“God, that’s terrific,” I said, feeling a small but vivid interior thrill.
I knew virtually nothing about Nathan’s work. Although he had told me in large (though generally impenetrable) detail about the technical nature of his research (enzymes, ion transference, permeable membranes, etc., also the fetus of that miserable rabbit), he had never divulged to me—nor had I out of reticence asked—anything concerning the ultimate justification for this complex and, beyond doubt, profoundly challenging biological enterprise. I knew also, from what she had intimated, that he had kept Sophie in the dark about his project. My earliest conjecture—farfetched even for a scientific ignoramus like myself (even then I was beginning to rue the lilac fin de siècle hours of my college days, with their total immersion in metaphysical poesy and Quality Lit., their yawning disdain of politics and the raw dirty world, their quotidian homage to the Kenyon Review, to the New Criticism and the ectoplasmic Mr. Eliot)—was that he was creating life full-blown from a test tube. Maybe Nathan was founding a new race of Homo sapiens, finer, fairer, fleeter than the bedeviled sufferers of the present day. I even envisioned a tiny embryonic Superman whom Nathan might be concocting at Pfizer, an inch-high square-jawed homunculus complete with cape and “S” emblazoned on his breast, ready to leap to his place in the color pages of Life as another miraculous artifact of our age. But this was a bootless piece of whimsy and I was really in the dark. Sophie’s sudden news that soon we would be enlightened was like receiving an electric jolt. I wanted only to hear more.
“He telephoned me this morning at work,” she explained, “at Dr. Blackstock’s, and said he wanted to have lunch with me. He wanted to tell me something. His voice sounded so excited, I just couldn’t imagine what it was. He was calling from his laboratory, and it was so unusual, you see, Stingo, because we almost never have lunch together. We are working so far away from each other. Besides, Nathan says we see so much of each other that having lunch together is maybe a little... de trop. Anyway, he called this morning and insisted in this very excited voice, and so we met in this Italian restaurant near Lafayette Square, where we had been together last year when we first met. Oh, Nathan was just wild with excitement! I thought he had a fever. And when we ate lunch he started to tell me what had happened. Listen to this, Stingo. He said that this morning he and his team—this research team—have make the final breakthrough they were hoping for. He said they were right upon the edge of the final discovery. Oh, Nathan could not eat he was so full of joy! And you know, Stingo, while Nathan was telling me these things I remember that it was right at this same table a year ago that he first told me about his work. He said what he was doing was a secret. What it was precisely he could not reveal, even to me. But I remember this—I remember him telling me that if it was successful it would end up being one of the greatest medical advances of all time. Those were his exact words, Stingo. He said that it wasn’t his work alone, there were others. But he was very proud of his own contribution. And then he said it again: one of the greatest medical advances of all time! He said it would win the Nobel Prize!”
She paused and I saw that her own face was rosy with excitement. “God, Sophie,” I said, “that’s just wonderful. What do you think it is? Didn’t he give you any hint at all?”
“No, he said he would have to wait until tonight. He could not tell me the secret at lunch, just that they had make the breakthrough. There is this great secrecy in the companies that make drugs like Pfizer, that is why Nathan is sometimes so mysterious. But I understand.”
“You’d think a few hours wouldn’t make any difference,” I said. I felt a frustrating impatience.
“Yes, but he said that it does. Anyway, Stingo, we’ll know what it is very soon. Isn’t it incredible, isn’t it formidable?” She squeezed my hand until my fingertips went numb.
It’s cancer, I thought all during Sophie’s little soliloquy. I had really begun to burst with happiness and pride, sharing Sophie’s own radiant exuberance. It’s a cure for cancer, I kept thinking; that unbelievable son of a bitch, that scientific genius whom I am privileged to call a friend has discovered a cure for cancer. I signaled to the bartender for more beer. A fucking cure for cancer!
But just at this instant, it seemed to me, Sophie’s mood underwent a subtly disturbing change. The excitement, the high spirits fled her and a note of concern—of apprehension—stole into her voice. It was as if she were affixing a gloomy and unpleasant afterthought to a letter which had been all the more factitiously cheerful because of the necessity of the grim postscript itself. (P.S. I want a divorce.) “We left the restaurant then,” she continued, “because he said that before we went back to work he wanted to buy me something, to celebrate. To celebrate his discovery. Something I could wear tonight when we celebrate together. Something chic and sexy. So we go to this very fine shop where we have been before and he buy me this blouse and skirt. And shoes. And some hats, and bags. Do you like it, this blouse?”
“It’s a knockout,” I said, understating my admiration.
“It’s very... daring, I think. Anyway, Stingo, the point is that while we are in this shop and he has paid for the clothes and we are ready to leave, I see something strange about Nathan. I have seen it before but not too often and it always scares me a little. He said suddenly that he had a headache, back here, at the back of his head. Also, he was suddenly very pale and make sweat—perspiring, you know. You see, I think it was as if all the excitement was too much for him and he was having this reaction that made him a little sick. I told him he should go home, back to Yetta’s and lie down, take the afternoon off, but no, he said he must go back to the laboratory, there was still much to do. The headache, he said, was terrible. I wanted him so much to go home and rest but he said he must go back to Pfizer. So he took three aspirin from the lady who own the shop, and he is calm now, no longer excited like he was. He is quiet, mélancholique even. And then very quietly he kissed me goodby and said he would see me tonight, here—here with you, Stingo. He wants the three of us to go down to Lundy’s Restaurant for a wonderful seafood dinner to celebrate. To celebrate winning the Nobel Prize of 1947.”
I had to tell her no. I was absolutely crushed at the idea that because of my father’s visit I would be unable to join them for the jamboree celebration; what a wicked disappointment! This augury of fabulous news was so itchingly teasing that I simply could not believe that I would be denied participating in the announcement when it came. “I’m just sorry beyond belief, Sophie,” I said, “but I’ve got to meet my father at Penn Station. But look, before I go, maybe Nathan can at least tell me what the discovery is. Then in a couple of days after my old man’s gone we can go out and have another celebration some other night.”
She appeared not to be listening any too closely, and I heard her continue in a voice that seemed to me both subdued and invaded by hints of foreboding. “I just hope he is okay. Sometimes when he gets excited so much and gets so happy—then he gets these terrible headaches and sweats so much it go through his clothes, like he’s been in the rain. Then the happiness is gone. And oh, Stingo, it don’t happen every time. But sometimes it make him so very, very strange! It’s like he gets so tellement agité, so happy and flying that he is like an airplane going up and up into the stratosphere where the air is so thin that he can’t fly no more and the only way is down. I mean all the way down, Stingo! Oh, I hope Nathan’s okay.”
“Listen, he’s going to be all right,” I assured her, a little uneasily. “Anyone with the story Nathan is going to tell has a right to act a little peculiar.” Although I could not share what were obviously her deep misgivings, I had to confess to myself that her words put me a bit on edge. Even so, I thrust them out of my mind. I wanted only for Nathan to arrive with news of his triumph and an explanation for this unbearably tantalizing mystery.
The jukebox started to blare. The bar was beginning to fill up with its gray evening habitué-—most of them middle-aged and male, porridge-faced even in midsummer, North European Gentiles with flabby paunches and serious thirsts who ran the elevators and unplugged the plumbing of the ten-story Jewish pueblos whose homely beige-brick ranks stretched for block after block in the region behind the park. Aside from Sophie, few females ever ventured into the place. I never saw a single hooker—the conventional neighborhood and the tired and baggy clientele precluded even the idea of any such sport—but there were, this special evening, two smiling nuns who bore down on Sophie and me with some kind of rattling tin-plated chalice and a murmured plea for charity, in the name of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Their English was preposterously broken, They looked Italian and were extremely ugly—one of them in particular, who wore at the corner of her mouth an awesome wen the size, shape and color of one of those University Residence Club cockroaches, out of which hair sprouted like cornsilk. I averted my eyes but scrounged in my pocket and came up with two dimes; Sophie, however, confronted with the jingling cup uttered a “No!” with such vehemence that the nuns drew back with a concerted gasp, then scuttled away, and I turned to her in surprise.
“Bad luck, two nuns,” she said morosely, then, after a pause, added, “I hate them! Weren’t they awful-looking!”
“I thought you were brought up a good sweet Catholic girl,” I said in a joshing tone.
“I was,” she replied, “but that was long ago. Anyway, I would hate nuns even if I cared about religion. Silly, stupid virgins! And so horrible-looking!” A tremor passed through her, she shook her head. “Awful! Oh, how I hate that stupid religion!”
“You know, it’s really strange, Sophie,” I put in, “I remember a few weeks ago how you were telling me about your devout childhood, and your belief, and all that. What is it that—”
But she shook her head again in a brisk, negative way, and lay her slender fingers on the back of my hand. “Please, Stingo, those nuns make me feel so pourri—rotten. Stinking. Those nuns grubbling...” She hesitated, looking perplexed.
“I think you mean groveling,” I said.
“Yes, groveling in front of a God who must be a monster, Stingo, if He exist. A monster!” She paused. “I don’t want to talk about religion. I hate religion. It is for, you know, des analphabétes, imbecile peoples.” She cast a glance at her wristwatch and remarked that it was after seven. Anxiety edged her voice. “Oh, I hope Nathan is okay.”
“Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine,” I said again in my most reassuring voice. “Look, Sophie, Nathan’s really been under tremendous pressure with this research project, this breakthrough, whatever it is. That strain is bound to make him behave, well, erratically—you know what I mean? Don’t worry about him. I’d have a headache too if I’d been through his kind of wringer—especially when it’s resulted in this incredible achievement.” I paused. I seemed constantly compelled to add, “Whatever it is.” I patted her hand in return. “Now please, just relax. He’ll be here in a minute, I’m certain.” At this point I made another reference to my father and his arrival in New York (fondly mentioning his generous concern for me, and his moral support, though making no note of the slave Artiste and his part in my destiny, rather doubting that Sophie had sufficient comprehension of American history, at least yet, to be able to grasp the complexities of the debt I owed to that black boy), and I continued in a general way to praise the luck of those young men like myself, relatively few in number, who possessed parents of such tolerance and selflessness and the will to have faith, blind faith, in a son reckless enough to seek to pluck a few leaves from the laurel branch of art. I was getting a little bit high. Fathers of this largeness of vision and amplitude of spirit were scarce, I averred sentimentally, beginning to feel my lips tingling from the beer.
“Oh, you’re so lucky to still have a father,” said Sophie in a faraway voice. “I miss my father so.”
I felt a little ashamed—no, not ashamed, inadequate would be better—thinking suddenly of the story she had told me, some weeks before, about her father herded together with the other Cracow professors like so many pigs, the Nazi machine guns, the stifling vans, Sachsenhausen, then death by firing squad in the cold snows of Germany. God, I thought, what Americans had been spared in our era, after all. Oh, we had done our brave and needful part as warriors, but how scant our count of fathers and sons compared to the terrible martyrdom of those unnumbered Europeans. Our glut of good fortune was enough to make us choke.
“It has been long enough now,” she went on, “that I no longer grieve like I did, but yet I miss him. He was such a good man—that is what make it so terrible, Stingo! When you think of all the bad people—Poles, Germans, Russians, French, all nationalities—all these evil people who escaped, people who killed Jews who are still alive right now. In Germany. And places like Argentina. And my father—this good man—who had to die! Isn’t that enough to make you not believe in this God? Who can believe in God who turn His back on people like that?” This outburst—this little aria—had come so swiftly that it surprised me; her fingers trembled slightly. Then she calmed down. And once again—as if she had forgotten that she had already once told me, or perhaps because the repetition gave her some forlorn comfort—she sketched the portrait she imagined of her father, in Lublin many years before, saving Jews from a Russian pogrom at peril to his life.
“What is the word l’ironie in English?”
“Irony?” I said.
“Yes, such an irony that a man like that, a man like my father, risk his life for Jews and die, and the Jew-killers live, so many of them, right now.”
“I’d say that’s less an irony, Sophie, than the way of the world,” I concluded a little sententiously but with seriousness, feeling the need to relieve my bladder.
I got up and made my way to the men’s room, weaving slightly, aglow at the edges of my skin with a penumbra of Rheingold, the jolly, astringent beer served at the Maple Court on draft. I richly enjoyed the men’s john at the Maple Court, where, cantilevered slightly forward over the urinal, I could brood over the plashing clear stream while Guy Lombardo or Sammy Kaye or Shep Fields or some other glutinously innocuous band rumbled faintly from the jukebox beyond the walls. It was wonderful to be twenty-two and a little drunk, knowing that all went well at the writing desk, shiveringly happy in the clutch of one’s own creative ardor and in that “grand certitude” Thomas Wolfe was always hymning—the certitude that the wellsprings of youth would never run dry, and that the wrenching anguish endured in the crucible of art would find its recompense in everlasting fame, and glory, and the love of beautiful women.
As I blissfully pissed I eyed the ubiquitous homosexual graffiti (inscribed there, God knows, not by the Maple Court regulars but by the transient trade which managed to scribble up the walls of any place, no matter how unlikely, where males unlimbered their joints) and with delight gazed once again at the smoke-stained but still vivid caricature on the wall: companion-piece to the mural outside, it was a masterpiece of 1930s innocent ribaldry, displaying Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in contortionist Peeping Tom postures, gleefully asquint through the interstices of a garden trellis as they observed little Betty Boop, enchanting and voluptuous of calf and thigh, squatting to take a pee. Suddenly I was stabbed with alarm, sensing an unholy and unnatural presence of flapping vulturous black, until I realized in an instant that the two mendicant nuns had blundered into the wrong facility. They were gone then in a flash, squawking in distressed Italian, and I rather hoped they had gotten a look at my schlong. Was it their entry—duplicating the bad omen Sophie had felt only a short while before—that presaged the evil contretemps of the next fifteen minutes or so?
I heard Nathan’s voice over Shep Fields’ rippling rhythm even as I approached the table. It was a voice not so much loud as incredibly assertive and it cut through the music like a hacksaw. It was filled with trouble, and though I wanted to retreat when I heard it I dared not, feeling something momentous in the air which impelled me on toward the voice and Sophie. And so totally immersed was Nathan in this rancorous message he was imparting to Sophie, so single-minded did he seem at that moment, that I was able to stand waiting by the table long minutes, listening in miserable discomfort while Nathan bullyragged and tore at her, quite oblivious that I was there.
“Haven’t I told you that the only single thing I absolutely demand from you is fidelity?” he said.
“Yes, but—” She could not get the words in.
“And didn’t I tell you that if you were ever with this guy Katz—ever again, outside of work—that if you ever so much as walked ten feet with this cheap shmatte, I’d break your ass?”
“Yes, but—”
“And this afternoon he brings you home again in his car! Fink saw you. And not only that, that cheap motherfucker, you take him up to the room. And you’re there for an hour with him. Did he lay you a couple of times? Oh, I’ll bet you Katz does quite a number with that fast chiropractor’s dick of his!”
“Nathan, let me explain!” she implored him. Her composure was fast dissolving, and her voice cracked.
“Shut your fucking yap! There’s nothing to explain! You’d have kept it a secret too, if my good old pal Morris hadn’t told me he’d seen the two of you go up there together.”
“I would not have kept it secret,” she wailed. “I would have tell you now! I did not have a chance yet, darling!”
“Shut up!”
Again the voice was not loud so much as chillingly domineering, scathing, irruptive. I yearned for an exit, but only stood there behind him, hesitant, waiting. My intoxication had bubbled away and I felt the blood pounding against my Adam’s apple.
She tried to persist in her plea. “Nathan darling, listen! The only reason I took him to the room was because of the phonograph. The changer part has not been working, you know that, and I told him and he said he might be able to fix it. He said he was an expert. And he did fix it, darling, that was all! I’ll show you, we’ll go back and play it—”
“Oh, I’ll bet old Seymour’s an expert,” Nathan put in. “Does he do a quick routine on your spinal column when he’s humping you? Does he get your vertebrae all in order with those slippery hands? The cheap fraud—”
“Nathan, please!” she entreated him. She was leaning forward toward him now. The blood seemed to have drained from her face, which wore an expression of terminal agony.
“Oh, you’re some dish, you are,” he said softly and slowly, in tones of sarcasm that sounded unbearably heavy, graceless.
He obviously had visited their lodgings at Yetta’s after returning from the lab; I inferred this not only because of his reference to Morris Fink’s outrageous tattle but because of his dress: he was decked out in his fanciest oyster-white linen suit, and heavy oval gold links sparkled on the cuffs of his custom-made shirt. He smelled pleasantly of a light, jaunty cologne. Plainly he had intended to match Sophie’s gala get-up that evening and had gone home to transform himself into the fashion plate I now beheld. There, however, he had been confronted with evidence of Sophie’s betrayal—or what he construed as such—and now there seemed no doubt that the celebration had not only become aborted, it was headed for unknown depths of disaster.
Writhing inwardly as I stood there, I held my breath and listened while Nathan continued. “You’re really some Polish dumpling. It was. over my dead body that I let you degrade yourself by continuing to work with these charlatans, these horse doctors. Bad enough you accept the money they make stretching the spines of ignorant, gullible old Jews just off the boat from Danzig, with pains that might be rheumatism or might be carcinoma but go undiagnosed because these snake-oil shysters con them into thinking that a simple back massage will return them to glowing health. Bad enough you managed to talk me into continuing this disgraceful collaboration with a couple of medical hoodlums. But it’s fucking unbearable to think that behind my back you would let either of these mangy characters get into that twat of yours—”
She tried to interrupt. “Nathan!”
“Shut up! I’ve had just about enough of you and your whorish behavior.” He was not talking loudly but there was something mincingly savage in his throttled-back rage that seemed more threatening than if his voice had been a roar; it was a bleak, reedy, thin, almost bureaucratic rage and his choice of phrase—“whorish behavior”—sounded incongruously tight-assed and rabbinical. “I thought somehow you would see the light, that you would abandon your ways after that escapade with Doctor Katz”—the accent on Doctor was a consummate sneer—“I thought I’d warned you off after that smooching business in his car. But no, I guess those pants you wear get a little too urgently hot in the crotch. And so when I caught you in a bit of hanky-panky with Blackstock, I wasn’t surprised, given your bizarre predilection for chiropractic penises—I wasn’t surprised, as I say, but when I blew the horn on you and put an end to it I thought you’d be chastened enough to abandon this wretched, degrading promiscuity. But no, once again I was wrong. The libidinal sap which courses so frantically in your Polish veins would allow you no ease, and so today once again you choose to fall into the ridiculous embrace—ridiculous, that is, if it weren’t really so vile and demeaning—of Doctor Seymour Katz.”
Sophie had begun to sniffle softly into a handkerchief clutched in white-knuckled fingers. “No, no, darling,” I heard her say in whispers, “it just isn’t true.”
Nathan’s stilted, didactic enunciation might have been, under different circumstances, vaguely comical—a burlesque of itself—but now was edged with such real threat, rage and obdurate conviction that I could not help but give a small shiver and feel at my back the approach, like the thudding of gallows-bound footsteps, of some awful and unnamed doom. I heard myself groan, clearly audible above the harangue, and it occurred to me that this dreadful assault on Sophie had weirdly identical resonances to those of the fracas in which I had first glimpsed him acting out his implacable enmity, the scenes distinguished one from the other mainly by the tone of voice—fortissimo that evening weeks ago, now singularly level and restrained but no less sinister. Abruptly I was conscious that Nathan was aware of my presence. His words were flatly uttered and edged with the faintest frost of hostility as he said to me, without looking up, “Why don’t you sit down next to the premiere putain of Flatbush Avenue.” I sat down but said nothing, my mouth having become parched and speechless.
As I seated myself, Nathan rose to his feet. “It seems to me that a little Chablis is in order now for furtherance of our celebration.” I gaped up at him while he spoke in this humorless, declamatory way. Suddenly I got the impression that he was exercising a severe control over himself, as if he were trying to prevent his entire big frame from flying apart or crumpling like a marionette on strings. I saw for the first time that shiny streams of sweat were coursing down his face, though our corner was ventilated by almost frigid breezes; also, there was something funny about his eyes—exactly what, at the moment, I could not tell. Some jittery and feverish nervous activity, I felt, some abnormally frantic interchange of neurons in their chaotic synapses, was taking place under each square millimeter of his skin. He was so emotionally jazzed up that he almost seemed to be electrified, as if he had strayed into a magnetic field. Yet it was all held back under tremendous composure.
“Too bad,” he said, again in tones of leaden irony, “too bad, my friends, that our celebration cannot continue in the vein of exalted homage I had intended for this evening. Homage to devoted hours in pursuit of a noble scientific goal which just this day has seen the light of triumph. Homage to days and years of a team’s selfless research terminating in victory over one of the greatest scourges to beset a suffering humanity. Too bad,” he said again, after a prolonged pause that was almost unendurable in the burden it imposed on the silently spun-out seconds, “too bad our celebration will be of a more mundane stripe. To wit, the necessary and all-too-healthy severance of my relationship with the sweet siren of Cracow—that inimitable, that incomparable, that tragically faithless daughter of joy, Poland’s gem and gift to the concupiscent chiropractors of Flatbush—Sophie Zawistowska! But wait, I must get the Chablis so we can drink a toast to that!”
Like a terrified child clutching at Daddy in the vortex of a mob, Sophie squeezed down on my fingers. We both watched Nathan stiffly shoulder his way to the bar through shoals of shirt-sleeved drinkers. I turned to look at Sophie then. Her eyes were completely out of kilter, unforgettably so in the face of Nathan’s threat. I would ever after define the word “distraught” by the raw fear I saw dwelling there. “Oh, Stingo,” she moaned, “I knew this was going to happen. I just knew he would accuse me of being unfaithful. He always does when he come into these strange tempêtes. Oh, Stingo, I just can’t bear it when he become like this. I just know this time he’s going to leave me.”
I tried to soothe her. “Don’t worry,” I said, “he’ll get over this thing.” I had small faith in those words.
“Oh no, Stingo, something terrible will happen, I know it! Always he get this way. First he is so excited, full of joy. Then he comes down, and when he comes down, it is always that I have been unfaithful and then he wants to leave me.” She squeezed again, so hard I thought that her fingernails might draw blood. “And what I said to him was true,” she added in a frantic hurry. “I mean about Seymour Katz. It was nothing, Stingo, nothing at all. This Dr. Katz means nothing to me, he is only someone I work for with Dr. Blackstock. And it is true what I said about him fixing the phonograph. That is all he did in the room, fix the phonograph, nothing else, I swear to you!”
“Sophie, I believe you,” I assured her, in a torture of embarrassment over the babbling vehemence with which she was trying to convince me, who was already convinced. “Just calm down,” I snapped at her futilely.
What happened rapidly thereafter seemed to me unimaginably senseless and horrible. And I realize how faulty were my own perceptions, how clumsily I handled the situation, with what lack of wit and with what ineffectiveness did I deal with Nathan at a moment when supreme delicacy was called for. For if I had only humored Nathan, jollied him along, I just might have watched him expend all of his rage—no matter how unreasonable and intimidating it was—and out of pure exhaustion fall into a state where I might have found him manageable, his fury smothered or at least on a tether. I might have been able to control him. But I also realize that I was at that time in many ways afflicted by a staggeringly puerile inexperience: far from my mind was any idea that Nathan—despite his manic tone of voice, the hectic oratory, the sweat, the walleyed expression, the frazzled tension, the whole portrait he presented of one whose entire nervous system down to its minutest ganglia was in the throes of a fiery convulsion—might be dangerously disturbed. I thought he was merely being a colossal prick. As I say, this was largely due to my age and a real guilelessness. Distracted, violent states in human beings having been alien to my experience—bound up as it had been less with the crazy Gothic side of a Southern upbringing than with the genteel and the well-behaved—I regarded Nathan’s outburst as a shocking failure of character, a lapse of decency, rather than the product of some aberration of mind.
This was as true now as it had been on that first night weeks ago in Yetta’s hallway when, as he stormed at Sophie and taunted me about lynchings and snarled “Cracker” in my face, I had caught a glimpse in his fathomless eyes of a wild, elusive discord that sent icewater flooding through my veins. And so as I sat there with Sophie, numb with discomfort, grieving at the appalling transformation which had overtaken this man whom I so cared for and admired, yet with indignation scraping me raw over the anguish he was forcing Sophie to endure, I resolved that I would draw the line as to how far Nathan would proceed in his harassment. He would bully Sophie no more, I decided, and he had fucking well better watch his step with me. This might have been a reasonable decision had I been dealing with a beloved friend who had simply let his temper get out of hand, but hardly (and I was not yet beginning to acquire the first flicker of wisdom to realize it) a man in whom paranoia was a sudden rampaging guest.
“Did you notice something very peculiar in his eyes?” I murmured to Sophie. “Do you think he might have taken too much of that aspirin you got for him, or something?” The innocence of such a question was, I now realize, almost inconceivable, given what was eventually to be revealed to me as the cause for those dilated pupils, the size of dimes; but then, I was learning a lot of new things in those days.
Nathan returned with the opened bottle of wine and sat down. A waiter brought glasses and set them before the three of us. I was relieved to see that the expression on Nathan’s face had softened somewhat, no longer quite the rancorous mask it had been only moments before. But the fierce strait-jacketed tension remained in the muscles of the cheek and neck and also the sweat poured forth: it stood out on his brow in droplets, matching in appearance—I noted irrelevantly—the mosaic of cool dewdrops on the bottle of Chablis. And then I caught sight for the first time of the great crescents of soaked white fabric underneath his arms. He poured wine in our glasses, and although I shrank from looking at Sophie’s face, I saw that her hand, holding the outstretched glass, was quivering. I had committed the major mistake of keeping unfolded on the table beneath my elbow the copy of the Post, with its page turned to the photograph of Bilbo. I saw Nathan glance at the picture and make what appeared to be a smirk full of enormous and wicked self-satisfaction.
“I read that article just a while ago on the subway,” he said, raising his glass. “I propose a toast to the slow, protracted, agonizing death of the Senator from Mississippi, Mushmouth Bilbo.”
I was silent for a moment. Nor did I raise my glass as Sophie did. She lifted hers out of nothing at this point, I was sure, but dumb reflexive obedience. Finally I said as casually as I was able, “Nathan, I want to propose a toast to your success, to your great discovery, whatever it is. To this wonderful thing you’ve been working on that Sophie’s told me about. Congratulations.” I reached forward and lightly, affectionately tapped the back of his arm. “Now let’s cut all this ugly shit”—I tried to inject a jovial, conciliatory note—“and let’s all relax while you tell us, for Christ’s sake, just tell us exactly what the hell it is we’re going to celebrate! Man, tonight we want to make all the toasts to you!”
A disagreeable chill went through me as I felt the brusque deliberateness with which he pulled his arm away from my hand. “That will be impossible,” he said, glaring at me, “my mood of triumph has been seriously compromised if not totally deflated by treachery at the hands of someone I used to love.” Still unable to glance at her, I heard Sophie give a single hoarse sob. “There will be no toast this evening to victorious Hygeia.” He was holding his glass aloft, elbow propped on the table. “We will toast instead the painful demise of Senator Bilbo.”
“You will, Nathan,” I said, “not I. I’m not going to toast anyone’s death—painful or not painful—and neither should you. You of all people should know better. Aren’t you in the healing business? This is not a very funny joke, you know: It’s fucking obscene to toast death.” My sudden pontifical tone was something I seemed unable to repress. I raised my own glass. “To life,” I proposed, “to your life, ours“—I made a gesture which included Sophie—“to health. To your great discovery.” I sensed a note of pleading in my voice, but Nathan remained immobile and grim-faced, refusing to drink. Stymied, feeling a spasm of desperation, I slowly lowered my glass. I also, for the first time, felt a touch of warm rage churning in the region of my abdomen; it was a slow conglomerate anger, directed in equal parts at Nathan’s hateful and dictatorial manner, his foul treatment of Sophie and (I could scarcely believe my own reflex now) his gruesome malediction against Bilbo. When he now failed to respond to my counter-toast, I set my glass down and said with a sigh, “Well, to hell with it, then.”
“To the death of Bilbo,” Nathan persisted, “to the sounds of the screams of his last agony.”
I sensed the blood flashing scarlet somewhere behind my eyes and my heart began a clumsy thumping. It was an effort to control my voice. “Nathan,” I said, “not long ago at one point I paid you a slight compliment. I said that despite your profound animosity toward the South, you at least retained a little sense of humor about it, unlike many people. Unlike the standard New York liberal jackass. But now I’m beginning to see that I was wrong. I’ve got no use for Bilbo and never did, but if you think there’s any comedy in this ham-handed bit about his death, you’re wrong. I refuse to toast the death of any man—”
“You would not toast the death of Hitler?” he put in quickly, with a mean glint in his eye.
It brought me up short. “Of course I would toast the death of Hitler. But that’s a fucking different matter! Bilbo’s not Hitler!” Even while I was replying to Nathan I realized with despair how we were duplicating the substance if not the same words of the enraged colloquy in which we had gotten so wildly embroiled that first afternoon in Sophie’s room. In the time since that deafening quarrel, which had so nearly become a fight, I mistakenly thought he had relinquished his murky idee fixe about the South. At this moment there was in his manner all the identical bottled-up surge of fury and venom which had truly scared me on that radiant Sunday, a day that for so long had seemed comfortably remote. I was scared once more, now to an even greater degree, for I had a grim augury that this time our struggle would not find sweet reconciliation in apologies, jokes and the jolly embrace of friendship. “Bilbo is not Hitler, Nathan,” I repeated. I heard my voice trembling. “Let me tell you something. For as long as I have known you—although it is admittedly not long, so I may have gotten the wrong impression—you have honestly impressed me as being one of the most sophisticated, savvy people I’ve ever known—”
“Don’t embarrass me,” he broke in. “Flattery will get you nowhere.” His voice was rasping, ugly.
“This is not flattery,” I went on, “only the truth. But what I’m getting at is this. Your hatred of the South—which often is clearly tantamount to expressing hatred, or at least dislike, for me—is appalling in anyone who like yourself is so knowing and judicious in so many other ways. It is downright primitive of you, Nathan, to be so blind about the nature of evil...”
In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin. (For a time I thought I might be a lawyer. The profession of law, and the courtrooms in which I once briefly entertained fantasies of playing out dramas like Clarence Darrow, lost only an incompetent stick when I turned to the literary trade.) “You seem to have no sense of history at all,” I went on rapidly, my voice scaling up an octave, “none at all! Could it be because you Jews, having so recently arrived here and living mostly in big Northern cities, are really purblind, and just have no interest in or awareness or any kind of comprehension whatever of the tragic concatenation of events that have produced the racial madness down there? You’ve read Faulkner, Nathan, and you still have this assy and intolerable attitude of superiority toward the place, and are unable to see how Bilbo is less a villain than a wretched offshoot of the whole benighted system?” I paused, drew a breath and said, “I pity you your blindness.” And here had I ceased and left it at that, I might have felt that I had registered a series of telling blows, but, as I say, good sense generally has deserted me in the course of such fevered arguments and my own semihysteric energy now propelled me into regions of deep asininity. “Besides,” I persisted, “you totally fail to realize what a man of real achievement Theodore Bilbo was.” Echoes of my college dissertation rattled about in my head with the filing-card rhythm of scholarly blank verse. “When he was governor, Bilbo brought Mississippi a series of important reforms,” I intoned, “including the creation of a highway commission and a board of pardons. He established the first tuberculosis sanatorium. He added manual training and farm mechanics to the curriculum of the schools. And finally he introduced a program to combat ticks...” My voice trailed off.
“He introduced a program to combat ticks,” Nathan said.
Startled, I realized that Nathan’s gifted voice was in perfect mockery of my own—pedantic, pompous, insufferable. “There was a widespread outbreak of something called Texas fever among the Mississippi cows,” I persisted uncontrollably. “Bilbo was instrumental—”
“You fool,” Nathan interrupted, “you silly klutz. Texas fever! You clown! You want me to point out that the glory of the Third Reich was a highway system unsurpassed in the world and that Mussolini made the trains run on time?”
He had me cold—I must have known it as soon as I heard myself utter the word “ticks”—and the grin that had appeared briefly on his face, a sardonic flash of teeth and a twinkle that recognized the shambles of my defeat, dissolved even as he now firmly lowered his glass.
“Have you finished your lecture?” he demanded in a voice that was too loud. The menace that darkened his face caused me a prickly fear. Suddenly he raised his glass and downed the wine in a single swallow. “This toast,” he announced in a flat tone, “is in honor of my complete dissociation from you two creeps.”
A piercing pang of regret went through my breast at these words. I sensed a heavy emotion roiling inside me that was like the onset of mourning. “Nathan...” I began placatingly, and stretched out my hand. I heard Sophie sob again.
But Nathan ignored my gesture. “Dissociation,” he said, with a tip of his glass at Sophie, “from you, the Coony Chiropractic Cunt of Kings County.” Then to me, “And to you, the Dreary Dregs of Dixie.” His eyes were as lifeless as billiard balls, sweat drained from his face in torrents. I was as intensely conscious—on one level—of these eyes and the skin of his face beneath its shimmering transparency of sweat as I was—on a purely auditory level, so rawly sensitive that I thought my eardrums might pop—of the voices of the Andrews Sisters exploding from the jukebox. “Don’t Fence Me In!” “Now,” he said, “perhaps you will permit me to lecture the two of you. It might do something for the rottenness dwelling at the core of your selves.”
I will skim over all but the worst of his tirade. The whole thing could not have taken more than several minutes, but it seemed hours. Sophie suffered the most fearsome part of his onslaught, and it was plainly closer to intolerable to her than it was to me, who only had to hear it and watch her suffer. By contrast I got off with a relatively light tongue-lashing, and it came first. He bore me no real ill feelings, he said, just contempt. Even his contempt for me was hardly personal, he went on, since I could not be held responsible for my upbringing or place of birth. (He delivered all this with a mocking half-smile and a controlled, soft voice tinged, off and on, incongruously, with the Negro accent I recalled from that faraway Sunday.) For a long time he had entertained the idea that I was a good Southerner, he said, a man emancipated, one who had somehow managed to escape the curse of bigotry which history had bequeathed to the region. He was not so foolishly blind (despite my accusations) as to be unaware that good Southerners did truly exist. He had thought of me as such until recently. But my refusal now to join in his execration of Bilbo only validated what he really had discovered about my “ingrained” and “unregenerate” racism, ever since that night he had read the first part of my book.
My heart fairly shriveled away at these words. “What do you mean?” I said, my voice close to a wail. “I thought you liked—”
“You have a pretty snappy talent in the traditional Southern mode. But you also have all the old clichés. I guess I didn’t want to bruise your feelings. But that old Negro woman in the beginning of the book, the one waiting with the others for the train. She’s a caricature, right out of Amos ’n’ Andy. I thought I was reading a novel by someone brought up writing old-time minstrel shows. It would be funny—that travesty of a Negro—if it weren’t so despicable. You may be writing the first Southern comic book.”
God, how vulnerable I was! I was engulfed by swift despair. If anyone but Nathan had said that! But with those words he had totally undermined the buoyant joy and confidence about my work which his earlier encouragement had implanted within me. It was so unutterably crushing, this sudden brutal brush-off, that I began to feel certain crucial underpinnings of my very soul shudder and disintegrate. I gulpingly struggled for a reply, which would not, strive as I might, get past my lips.
“You’ve been badly infected by that degeneracy,” he continued. “It’s something you can’t help. It doesn’t make you or your book any more attractive but at least it’s possible to feel that you’re more of a passive vessel for the poison rather than a willing—how would you describe it?—a willing disseminator. Like, say, Bilbo.” Now his voice abruptly lost the faint throaty Negroid quality with which it had been touched; in moist metamorphosis the Southern accent faded and died, replaced by thorny Polish diphthongs that were in almost exact mimicry of Sophie’s own speech. And it was here, as I say, that his punishing callousness turned into outright persecution. “Peut-être after all dese mawnths,” he said, leveling his gaze on Sophie, “you kin explain de mystewy of why you are here, you off all people, walking dese stweets, dwenched in enticing perfumery, engaged in suwweptitious venery wiff not wan but two—count dem, ladies and gentlemen—two chiropractors. In short, making hay while de sun shine, to employ an old bwomide, while at Auschwitz de ghosts off de millions off de dead still seek an answer.” Suddenly he dropped the parody. “Tell me why it is, oh beauteous Zawistowska, that you inhabit the land of the living. Did splendid little tricks and stratagems spring from that lovely head of yours to allow you to breathe the clear Polish air while the multitudes at Auschwitz choked slowly on the gas? A reply to this would be most welcome.”
A terrible drawn-out groan escaped Sophie then, so loud and tormented that only the frenzied squalling of the Andrews Sisters prevented it from being heard throughout the entire bar. Mary in her anguish on Calvary could not have made a more wretched noise. I turned to look at Sophie. She had thrust her face downward so that it was buried and out of sight, and had clapped her whiteknuckled fists futilely over her ears. Her tears were trickling down onto the speckled Formica. I thought I heard her muffled words: “No! No! Menteur! Lies!”
“Not so many months ago,” he persisted, “in the depths of the war in Poland, several hundred Jews who escaped from one of the death camps sought refuge at the homes of some fine Polish citizens like yourself. These darling people refused them shelter. Not only this. They murdered practically all the rest they could get their hands on. I have brought this to your attention before. So please answer again. Did the same anti-Semitism for which Poland has gained such world-wide renown—did a similar anti-Semitism guide your own destiny, help you along, protect you, in a manner of speaking, so that you became one of the minuscule handful of people who lived while the millions died?” His voice became harsh, cutting, cruel. “Explanation, please!”
“No! No! No! No!” Sophie sobbed.
I heard my own voice now. “Nathan, for Christ’s sake, lay off her!” I had gotten to my feet.
But he was not to be deterred. “What fine handiwork of subterfuge did you create in order that your skin might be saved while the others went up in smoke? Did you cheat, connive, lay your sweet little ass—“
“No!” I heard her groan, that sound again wrested from her nethermost depths. “No! No!”
I did an inexplicable and, I’m afraid, craven thing then. Having risen fully upright, I was on the absolute verge (I could feel the impulse in me like a powerful vibration) of leaning forward and grasping Nathan by the collar, pulling him to his feet for an eye-to-eye confrontation, as Bogart had done so many times in Bogart’s and my entwined past. I could not suffer what Nathan was doing to her a second more. But having risen, having been galvanized by the impulse, I was with mysterious speed transformed into a triumphant paradigm of chickenshit. I felt a quaking in the knees, my parched mouth gave forth a string of senseless vocables, and then I found myself lurching toward the men’s room, blessed sanctuary from a spectacle of hatred and cruelty such as I had never conceived I would witness firsthand. I’ll only be here for a minute, I thought, leaning over the urinal. I’ve got to collect my senses before I go out and deal with Nathan. In a somnambulist’s stupor I clutched at the handle of the urinal’s valve, an icy dagger in my palm, pumping over and over again sluggish jets of water while the faggot graffiti—Marvin sucks!... Call ULster 1-2316 for dream blowjob—registered for the hundredth time in my brain like demented cuneiform. Since my mother’s death I had not wept, and I knew I would not now, even though the pining lovelorn scrawls against the tiles, blurring into smudge, signaled that I might now come close to weeping. I spent perhaps three or four minutes in this chilly, miserable, indecisive stance. Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being. But when I threw open the door again, I saw that Sophie and Nathan were gone.
I was groggy with worry and despair. Nor did I have any idea how to deal with the situation as it now stood, with its overtone of irreconcilable strife. Obviously I had to ponder what to do, had to figure out how to try to set things straight—somehow calm Nathan down and in the process remove Sophie from the target area of his blind and baleful rage—but I was so completely rattled that my brain had become almost amnesic; I was virtually unable to think. In order to collect my senses I decided to stay there at the Maple Court for a while, during which time I hoped to lay out a bright and rational plan of action. I knew that when my father arrived at Penn Station and did not see me, he would go straight to the hotel—the McAlpin on Broadway at Thirty-fourth Street. (In those days everyone from the Tidewater of my father’s middle social station stayed either at the McAlpin or the Taft; the very few who were more affluent always frequented the Waldorf-Astoria.) I called the McAlpin and left a message saying I would see him there late in the evening. Then I returned to the table (it was another evil sign, I thought, that in their swift exit either Nathan or Sophie had overturned the bottle of Chablis, which, though unbroken, lay on its side dripping its dregs onto the floor) and sat for two full hours brooding over the way in which I must collect and put back together the shards of our fragmented friendship. I suspected it would be no easy task, given the colossal dimensions of Nathan’s fury.
On the other hand, recalling how on that Sunday following a similar “tempest” he had made overtures of friendship so warm and eager as to be almost embarrassing, and had actually apologized to me for his misbehavior, it occurred to me that he might welcome any gestures of pacification I would make. God knows, I thought, it was something I hated to do; scenes such as I had just been a participant in fractured my spirit, exhausted me; all I really wanted to do was to curl up and take a nap. Confronting Nathan again this soon was an idea intimidating and fraught with potential menace; queasy, I felt myself perspiring as Nathan had done. To screw up courage I took my time and drank four or five or, maybe, six medium-sized glasses of Rheingold. Visions of Sophie’s pathetic and disheveled agony, her total disarray, kept flashing on and off in my mind, causing my stomach to heave. Finally, though, as dark fell over Flatbush, I wandered a little drunkenly back through the sultry dusk to the Pink Palace, gazing up with tangled apprehension and hope at the soft glow, the color of rose wine, that blossomed out from beneath Sophie’s window blind, indicating that she was there. I heard music; it was either her radio or her phonograph playing. I don’t know why I was at the same time so buoyed up and saddened by the lovely and plaintive sound of the Haydn concerto for cello, washing down soft on the summer evening when I approached the house. Children called through the twilight from the Parade Grounds at the park’s edge, and their cries, sweet as the piping of birds, mingled with the cello’s gentle meditation and pierced me with some profound, aching, all but unrecapturable remembrance.
I caught my breath in anguish at the sight which greeted me on the second floor. Had a typhoon swept through the Pink Palace, there could not have been a more horrendous effect of havoc and shambles. Sophie’s room looked as if it had been turned upside down; dresser drawers had been pulled out and emptied, the bed had been stripped, the closet ransacked. A litter of newspapers was strewn on the floor. The shelves had been emptied of books. The phonograph records were gone. Save for the paper debris, nothing was left. There was a single exception to the general look of plunder—the radio-phonograph. Doubtless too large and bulky to have been lugged off, it remained on the table, and the sound of the Haydn emanating from its gorge caused me an eerie chill, as if I were listening to music in a concert hall from which the audience had mysteriously fled. Only steps away, in Nathan’s room, the effect was the same: everything had been removed or, if not taken away, had been packed in cardboard boxes that looked ready for immediate transfer. The heat hung close and sticky in the hallway; it was heat unreasonably intense even for the summer evening—adding bafflement to the chagrin with which I was already overwhelmed—and for an instant I thought there must be a conflagration lurking behind the pink walls until I suddenly spied Morris Fink crouched in one corner, laboring over a steaming radiator.
“It must of got turned on by accident,” he explained, standing up as I approached. “Nathan must of turned it on by accident a little while ago when he was running around with his suitcase and things. There, you cocksucker,” he snarled at the radiator, giving it a kick, “that’ll fix your guts.” The steam expired with a little hiss and Morris Fink regarded me with his lugubrious lackluster eyes. An overbite I had not really noticed before made him look pronouncedly like a rodent. “This place for a while, it was like a cuckoo ranch.”
“What happened?” I said, cold with apprehension. “Where’s Sophie? Where’s Nathan?”
“They’re gone, both of them. They finally cut out for good.”
“What do you mean, for good?”
“Just what I said,” he replied. “Finished. For good. Gone for good, and fuckin’ good riddance, I say. There was something creepy, I mean sick about this house with that fuckin’ golem Nathan. All that fightin’ and screamin’. Fuckin’ good riddance, if you want to know.”
I felt desperation edging my voice as I demanded, “But where did they go? Did they tell you where they were going?”
“No,” he said, “they went in two directions.”
“Two directions? Do you mean...”
“I seen them come back in the house about two hours ago just when I was walkin’ up the street. I’d went out to a movie. Already he was howlin’ at her like a gorilla. I said to myself: Oh shit, another fight already, after all these weeks when it was quiet. Now I got to maybe try to save her again from this meshuggener. But then when I get to the house here I see that he’s makin’ her pack up. I mean, he’s in his room, see, packin’ his own things, and she’s in the other room packin’ hers. And all the time he’s hollerin’ at her like a madman—oy, what dirty things he calls her!”
“And Sophie...”
“And she—she’s cryin’ her eyes out the whole time, the two of them packin’ their things and him screamin’ and callin’ her a whore and a cunt and Sophie bawlin’ like a baby. It made me sick!” He paused, took a swallow of air, then resumed more slowly. “I didn’t realize that they were packin’ to leave for good. Then he looked down over the railing and seen me and asked where Yetta was. I said she was over in Staten Island visitin’ her sister. He threw me down thirty dollars for the rent, Sophie’s and his. Then I realized they were gettin’ out for good.”
“When did they finally go?” I asked. A sense of loss that was as suffocatingly painful as actual bereavement welled up in me; I gagged on a wet heave of nausea. “Didn’t they leave an address?“
“I tell you they went in two different directions,” he said impatiently. “They get their stuff all packed finally and go downstairs. This was only about twenty minutes ago. Nathan gives me a buck to help bring the baggage down, also to take care of the phonograph. Says he’ll come back and get it later, along with some boxes. Then when the baggage is all out on the sidewalk he gets me to go up to the corner and flag down a couple of taxis. When I come back with the taxis he’s still hollerin’ at her, and I say to myself: Well, at least this time he didn’t hit her or nothin’. But he’s still hollerin’ at her, about Owswitch mainly. Something like Owswitch.”
“About... what?”
“About Owswitch, that’s what he says. Called her a cunt again and asked her this weirdo question over and over. Asked her how come she lived through Owswitch. What did he mean by that?”
“Called her...” I faltered helplessly, nearly bereft of speech. “Then what...”
“Then he gave her fifty bucks—it looked like about that—and told the driver to take her someplace in New York, Manhattan, some hotel I think, I can’t remember where. He said somethin’ about how happy he’d be never to have to see her again. I’ve never heard anyone cry like that Sophie was cryin’ then. Anyway, after she was gone he put his own things in the other cab and left in the opposite direction, up toward Flatbush Avenue. I think he must of went to his brother’s in Queens.”
“Gone then,” I whispered, evilly stricken now.
“Gone for good,” he replied, “and good fuckin’ riddance I say. That guy was a golem! But Sophie—Sophie I feel sorry for. Sophie was a real nice broad, you know?”
For a moment I could say nothing. The gentle Haydn, murmurous with longing, filled the abandoned room nearby with its sweet, symmetrical, pensive cadences, adding to my feeling of some absolute void, and of irretrievable loss.
“Yes,” I said finally, “I know.”
“What’s Owswitch?” said Morris Fink.