Sophie's Choice (35 page)

Maple Court when he bade both of us his adamantly final, unfond farewell. I was about to point out to Sophie the similarity and question her about it, but by this time--devouring a huge steaming mound of spaghetti in a little Italian restaurant she and Nathan used to frequent on Coney Island Avenue--she had become so totally absorbed in her chronicle of their life together that I hesitated, faltered helplessly, then lumpishly kept silent. I considered the whiskey. It was baffling about Sophie and her whiskey--baffling and a little overpowering. For one thing, she had the capacity of a Polish hussar; it was astounding to see this poised, lovely and usually painfully correct creature put away the booze; fully a quarter of the fifth of Seagram's I had bought her had vanished by the time we took a taxi to the restaurant. (She also insisted on transporting the bottle, upon which, it is important to add, I committed no incursions, sticking, as always, to beer.) I attributed this new indulgence to grief over Nathan's abandonment. Even so, I was more struck by the manner of Sophie's drinking than the amount. For the fact is that these powerful eighty-six-proof spirits diluted with only a little water had no apparent disorganizing effect on Sophie's tongue or thought processes at all. At least this was true when I first witnessed her new-found diversion. Utterly composed, each yellow lock in place, she could slosh it down with the toothy glee of a barmaid out of Hogarth. I wondered if she was not protected by some genetic or cultural adaptation to alcohol which Slavic people seem to share with the Celts. Save for a tender rosiness, there were only two ways in which Seagram's 7 seemed to alter her expression or her manner. It did turn her into a runaway talker. It made her pour it all out. Not that she had ever held back with me when speaking about Nathan or Poland or the past. But the whiskey transformed her speech into a spillway notable for its precise, unhurried cadences. It was a kind of lubricated diction in which many of the more briery Polish-accented consonants became magically smoothed over. The other thing whiskey did to her was quite fetching. Fetching, that is, in a maddeningly frustrating way: it let loose practically all of her dammed-up reticences about sex. I squirmed with mixed discomfort and delight as she spoke of her past love life with Nathan. The words came out in a charmingly open, unabashed, tickled voice, like that of a child who has discovered pig Latin. "He said I was a wonderful piece of ass," she announced nostalgically, and shortly after this, told me, "We used to love to fuck in front of mirrors." God, if she only knew what manner of sugarplums danced in my head when she gave tongue to such delicious conceits. But for the most part her mood was funereal when she spoke of Nathan, reminiscing with a persistent use of the past tense; it was as if she were speaking of someone long ago dead and buried. And when she related the story of their "suicide pact" on that weekend in the frosty Connecticut countryside, I was saddened and astonished. Even so, I do not think that my astonishment over that mournful little incident could have been exceeded by any form of surprise when, shortly before telling me about that aborted appointment with death, she revealed still another piece of dismal news. "You know, Stingo," she said a little hesitantly, "you know that Nathan was always taking drugs. I didn't know if you could see this or not. Anyway, for some reason I have not been quite honest with you. I have not been able to mention it." Drugs, I thought, merciful God. I really found it almost impossible to believe. The up-to-date reader of this narrative has most likely assumed such a fact about Nathan already, but certainly I had not. In 1947 I was as innocent about drugs as I was about sex. (Oh, those lamblike forties and fifties!) Our present-day drug culture had not seen, that year, even the glimmerings of dawn, and my notion of addiction (if I had ever really thought of such a thing) was connected with the idea of "dope fiends"--goggle-eyed madmen in strait jackets immured in backwater asylums, slavering molesters of children, zombies stalking the back streets of Chicago, comatose Chinese in their smoky dens, and so on. There was the taint about drugs of the irredeemably depraved, almost as evil as certain images of sexual intercourse--which until I was at least thirteen I visualized as a brutish act committed in secrecy upon dyed blondes by huge drunken unshaven ex-convicts with their shoes on. As for drugs, certainly I knew nothing about the types and subtle gradations of these substances. Save for opium, I do not think that I could name a single drug, and what Sophie disclosed about Nathan produced the immediate effect on me of having heard about something criminal. (That it was criminal was incidental to my moral shock.) I told her I didn't believe it, but she assured me it was true, and when directly after this my shock merged into curiosity and I asked her what he had used, I heard for the first time the word amphetamine. "He took this stuff called Benzedrine," she said, "also cocaine. But huge doses. Enough sometimes to make him crazy. It was easy enough for him to get this at Pfizer, at the laboratory where he was doing his work. Although, of course, it was not legal." So that was it, I thought in wonder, that was behind those seizures of rage, of seething violence, of paranoia. How blind I had been! Yet she was aware now, she said, that most of the time he had his habit under control. Nathan had always been high-strung, vivacious, talkative, agitated; since throughout the first five months they were together (and they were together constantly) she rarely saw him in the act of taking "the stuff," she made only the most belated connection between drugs and what she simply thought was his somewhat frenetic but ordinary behavior. And she went on to say that during those months of the previous year his behavior--drug-induced or not--his presence in her life, his entire being, brought her the happiest days she had ever known. She realized how helpless and adrift she had been during that time when she first came to Brooklyn and to Yetta's rooming house; trying to hold on to her reason, trying to thrust away the past from the rim of her memory, she thought she was in control of herself (after all, had not Dr. Blackstock told her that she was the most efficient secretary-receptionist he had ever known?), but in reality she was on the verge of becoming emotionally unhelmed, no more in command of her destiny than a puppy that has been hurled floundering into a turbulent pool. "Whoever it was that finger-fucked me that day in the subway made me see that," she said. Even though she had been momentarily restored from that trauma, she knew she was on a downward slide--hurtling fatally and rapidly down--and she could hardly bear to think what might have happened to her had not Nathan (blundering like herself into the library on that momentous day, searching for an out-of-print copy of a book of short stories by Ambrose Bierce; bless Bierce! praise Bierce!) appeared like a redemptive knight from the void and restored her to life. Life. That is what it was. He had actually given her life. He had (helped by the good offices of his brother Larry) restored her to health, causing her bloodsucking anemia to be corrected at Columbia Presbyterian, where the gifted Dr. Hatfield found a few other nutritional defects that needed straightening out. For one thing, he discovered that even after all these months she had the residual effects of scurvy. So he prescribed huge pills. Soon the ugly little skin hemorrhages, which had plagued her all over, disappeared, but even more remarkable was the change that came over her hair. Her golden hair had always been her most reassuring physical vanity, but having passed through Hades like the rest of her body, it had grown out scruffy, dull and fatigued-looking. Dr. Hatfield's ministrations changed all that too, and it was not very long--six weeks or so--before Nathan was purring like a hungry tomcat into its luxuriance, stroking it compulsively and insisting that she should start modeling for shampoo ads. Indeed, supervised by Nathan, the splendid apparatus of American medicine brought Sophie as close to a state of smiling fitness as could be wrought upon a person who had suffered such dreadful damage--and this included her marvelous new teeth. Her choppers, as Nathan referred to them, replaced the temporary false teeth which had been installed by the Red Cross in Sweden, and were the handiwork of still another friend and colleague of Larry's--one of New York's classiest practitioners of prosthodontia. Those teeth were hard to forget. They had to be the dental equivalent of Benvenuto Cellini. They were fabulous teeth, with a kind of icy, mother-of-pearl sparkle; every time she opened her mouth really wide I was reminded of Jean Harlow in smoochy close-ups, and on one or two memorably sunny days when Sophie burst into laughter those teeth lit up an entire room like a flashbulb. So, brought back to the land of the living, she could only treasure the wonderful time she had with Nathan all through that summer and early fall. His generosity was exhaustless, and although a greed for luxury was not a component of her nature, she liked the good life and she accepted his bounty with pleasure--as much of her pleasure deriving from the delight which pure giving plainly gave to him as from the things themselves which he gave. And he gave her and shared in everything she could possibly have wanted: record albums of beautiful music, tickets to concerts, Polish books and French books and American books, divine meals in restaurants of every ethnic description all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. As with his nose for wine, Nathan had an informed palate (a reaction, he said, to a childhood surfeit of soggy kreplach and gefilte fish) and he took obvious joy in making her acquainted with New York's incredible and manifold banquet. Money itself never seemed to be of any object; his job at Pfizer obviously paid well. He bought her fine clothes (including the droll and beguiling matching "costumes" I first saw them dressed in), rings, earrings, bracelets, bangles, beads. Then there were the movies. During the war she had missed them with almost the same longing as she had missed music. In Cracow before the war there had been a period when she had drenched herself in American movies--the bland innocent romances of the thirties, with stars like Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon and Gable and Lombard. She had also adored Disney, especially Mickey Mouse and Snow White. And--oh God!--Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat! And so in New York's paradise of theatres she and Nathan sometimes went on weekend binges--staring themselves red-eyed through five, six, seven films between Friday night and the last show on Sunday. Nearly everything she possessed flowed from Nathan's munificence, including even (she said with a giggle) her diaphragm. Having her fitted for a diaphragm by one more of Larry's associates was a final and perhaps artfully symbolic touch in Nathan's program of restorative medicine; she had never used a diaphragm before and accepted it with a rush of liberating satisfaction, feeling that it was the ultimate token of her leave-taking from the church. But it liberated her in more than one way. "Stingo," she said, "never did I think two people could fuck so much. Or love it so much either." The only thorn in this bower of roses, Sophie told me, was her employment. That is, the fact that she continued to work for Dr. Hyman Blackstock, who, after all, was a chiropractor. To Nathan, brother of a first-rate doctor, a young man who considered himself a dedicated scientist (and for whom the canons of medical ethics were as sacred as if he himself had taken the Hippocratic oath), the idea of her laboring in the employ of a quack was nearly intolerable. He told her point-blank that in his view it was tantamount to whoring and he implored her to quit. To be sure, for a long time he made an extended joke out of it all, concocting all sorts of gags and stories about chiropractors and their shoddy craft that caused her to laugh despite herself; the general facetiousness of his attitude allowed her to decide that his objections were not to be taken too seriously. Even so, when his complaints grew louder and his animadversions more serious and cutting, she steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of leaving her job, as uncomfortable as the whole situation seemed to make Nathan feel. It was one of the few tangents in their relationship where she felt unable to adopt a subservient point of view. And she was firm about the matter. After all, she was not married to Nathan. She had to feel a certain independence. She had to remain employed in that year when employment was devilishly difficult to come by, especially for a young woman who (as she kept pointing out to Nathan) had "no talents." Furthermore, she felt very secure in this job where she could speak in her native tongue to the boss, and she had frankly grown quite fond of Blackstock. He was like a godfather or beloved uncle to her and she made no bones about the fact. Alas, she came to realize that it was this perfectly innocuous fondness, containing no romantic overtone whatever, that Nathan misconstrued, adding fuel to his seething animosity. It would perhaps have been faintly comic had not his misplaced jealousy contained seeds of the violent, and worse... Earlier there was a bizarre, peripheral tragedy affecting Sophie which should be recounted here if only because of the way in which it elaborates all the foregoing. It has to do with Blackstock's wife, Sylvia, and the fact that she was a "problem drinker"; the horrible event itself occurred about four months after Sophie and Nathan began keeping company, in the early fall... "I knew knee-deep she was a problem drinker," Blackstock later told Sophie in his desperate lament, "but I had no idea how great was her problem." He confessed with wrenching guilt to a certain willful blindness: coming home night after night to St. Albans from his office he would try to ignore her slurred speech after the single cocktail, usually a Manhattan, which he served both of them, attributing her addled tongue and unsteady gait to a simple intolerance of alcohol. But even so, he knew he was fooling himself, in his desperate love for her shrinking from the truth that was revealed in graphic figuration a few days after her death. Stuffed into a closet in her private dressing room--a sanctum never penetrated by Blackstock--were over seventy empty quart bottles of Southern Comfort, which the poor woman apparently dreaded to risk disposing of, although she plainly had no trouble acquiring the powerful sweet elixir and stowing it away