Sophie's Choice (47 page)

like panic within me, I wanted to hear no more about Auschwitz, not another word. Yet a trace of the momentum of which I have spoken was still at work upon Sophie (though I realized that her spirits were bedraggled and frayed) and she kept going long enough to tell me, in one brief insistent burst, of her last leavetaking from the Commandant of Auschwitz. "He said to me, 'Go now.' And I turned and started to go and I said to him, 'Danke, mein Kommandant, for helping me.' Then he said--you must believe me, Stingo--he said this. He said, 'Hear that music? Do you like Franz Lehár? He is my favorite composer.' I was so startled by this strange question, I could barely answer. Franz Lehár, I thought, and then I found myself saying, 'No, not really. Why?' He looked disappointed for a moment, and then he said again, 'Go now.' And so I went. I walked downstairs past Emmi's room and there was the little radio playing again. This time I could have taken it easily because I looked around very carefully and there was no Emmi anywhere. But as I say, I didn't have the courage to do what I should have done, with my hope for Jan and everything. And I knew that this time they would suspect me first. So I left the radio there, and was suddenly filled with a terrible hatred for myself. But I left it there and it was still playing. Can you imagine what it was that the radio was playing? Guess what, Stingo." There comes a point in a narrative like this one when a certain injection of irony seems inappropriate, perhaps even "counterin-dicated"--despite the underlying impulse toward it--because of the manner in which irony tends so easily toward leadenness, thus taxing the reader's patience along with his or her credulity. But since Sophie was my faithful witness, supplying the irony herself as a kind of coda to testimony I had no reason to doubt, I must set her final observation down, adding only the comment that these words of hers were delivered in that wobbly tone of blurred, burned-out, exhausted emotional pandemonium-part hilarity, part profoundest grief--which I had never heard before in Sophie, and only rarely before in anyone, and which plainly signaled the onset of hysteria. "What was it playing?" I said. "It was the overture to this operetta of Franz Lehér," she gasped, "Das Land des Lächelns--The Land of Smiles." It was well past midnight when we strolled the short blocks home to the Pink Palace. Sophie was calm now. No one was abroad in the balmy darkness, and along the maple-lined summer streets the houses of the good burghers of Flatbush were lightless and hushed with slumber. Walking next to me, Sophie wound her arm around my waist and her perfume momentarily stung my senses, but I understood the gesture by now to be merely sisterly or friendly, and besides, her long recital had left me far beyond any stirrings of desire. Gloom and despondency hung over me like the August darkness itself and I wondered idly if I would be able to sleep. Approaching Mrs. Zimmerman's stronghold, where a night light glowed dimly in the pink hallway, we stumbled slightly on the rough sidewalk and Sophie spoke for the first time since we had left the bar. "Have you got an alarm clock, Stingo? I've got to get up so early tomorrow, to move my things into my new place and then get to work on time. Dr. Blackstock has been very patient with me during these past few days, but I really must get back to work. Why don't you call me during the middle of the week?" I heard her stifle a yawn. I was about to make a reply about the alarm clock when a shadow, dark gray, detached itself from the blacker shadows surrounding the front porch of the house. My heart made a bad beat and I said, "Oh my God." It was Nathan. I uttered his name in a whisper just as Sophie recognized him too and gave a soft moan. For an instant I had the, I suppose, reasonable idea that he was going to attack us. But then I heard Nathan call out gently, "Sophie," and she disengaged her arm from my waist with such haste that my shirttail was pulled out of my trousers' waistband. I halted and stood quite still as they plunged toward each other through the chiaroscuro of dimly trembling, leafy light, and I heard the sobbing sounds that Sophie made just before they collided and embraced. For long moments they clung together, merged into each other amid the late-summer darkness. Then at last I saw Nathan slowly sink to his knees on the hard pavement, where, surrounding Sophie's legs with his arms, he remained motionless for what seemed an interminable time, frozen in an attitude of devotion, or fealty, or penance, or supplication--or all of these.

Chapter 14

Nathan recaptured us easily, not a minute too soon. After our remarkably sweet and easy reconciliation--Sophie and Nathan and Stingo--one of the first things that I remember happening was this: Nathan gave me two hundred dollars. Two days after their happy reunion, after Nathan had reestablished himself with Sophie on the floor above and I had ensconced myself once more in my primrose-hued quarters, Nathan learned from Sophie the fact that I had been robbed. (Morris Fink, incidentally, had not been the culprit. Nathan noticed that my bathroom window had been forced--something Morris would not have had to do. I was ashamed of my nasty suspicion.) The next afternoon, returning from lunch at a delicatessen on Ocean Avenue, I found on my desk his check made out to me for that sum which in 1947, to a person in my state of virtual destitution, can only be described as, well, imperial. Clipped to the check was the handwritten note: To the greater glory of Southern Literature. I was flabbergasted. Naturally, the money was a godsend, bailing me out at a moment when I was frantic with worry over the immediate future. It was next to impossible to turn it down. But my various religious and ancestral scruples forbade my accepting it as a gift. So after a great deal of palaver and good-natured argument, we reached what might be called a compromise. The two hundred dollars would remain a gift so long as I remained an unpublished writer. But when and if my novel found a publisher and made enough money to relieve me from financial pressure--then and only then would Nathan accept any repayment I might wish to make (without interest). A still, small, mean-spirited voice at the back of my mind told me that this largess was Nathan's way of atoning for the horrid attack he had made on my book a few nights before, when he had so dramatically and cruelly banished Sophie and me from his existence. But I dismissed the thought as unworthy, especially in the light of my newly acquired knowledge, through Sophie, of that drug-induced derangement which had doubtless caused him to say hatefully irresponsible things--words it was now clear he no longer remembered. Words which I was certain were as lost to his recollection as his own loony, destructive behavior. Besides, I was quite simply devoted to Nathan, at least to that beguiling, generous, life-enhancing Nathan who had shed his entourage of demons--and since it was this Nathan who had returned to us, a Nathan rather drawn and pale but seemingly purged of whatever horrors had possessed him on that recent evening, the reborn warmth and brotherly affection I felt was wonderful; my delight could only have been surpassed by the response of Sophie, whose joy was a form of barely controlled delirium, very moving to witness. Her continuing, unflagging passion for Nathan struck me with awe. His abuse of her was plainly either forgotten or completely pardoned. I'm certain she would have gathered him into her bosom with as much hungry and heedless forgiveness had he been a convicted child molester or ax murderer. I did not know where Nathan had spent the several days and nights since that awful performance he had put on at the Maple Court, although something Sophie said in an offhand way made me think that he had sought refuge with his brother in Forest Hills. But his absence and his whereabouts did not seem to matter; in the same way, his devastating attractiveness made it seem of small importance that he had recently reviled Sophie and me in such an outpouring of animosity and spite that it had made us both physically ill. In a sense, the in-and-out addiction which Sophie had so vividly and scarily described to me had the effect of drawing me closer to Nathan, now that he was back; romantic as my reaction doubtless was, his demonic side--that Mr. Hyde persona who possessed him and devoured his entrails from time to time--seemed now an integral and compelling part of his strange genius, and I accepted it with only the vaguest misgivings about some frenzied recurrence in the future. Sophie and I were--to put it obviously--pushovers. It was enough that he had reentered our lives, bringing to us the same high spirits, generosity, energy, fun, magic and love we had thought were gone for good. As a matter of fact, his return to the Pink Palace and his establishment once again of the cozy love nest upstairs seemed so natural that to this day I cannot remember when or how he transported back all the furniture and clothing and paraphernalia he had decamped with that night, replacing them so that it appeared that he had never stormed off with them at all. It was like old times again. The daily routine began anew as if nothing had ever happened--as if Nathan's violent furor had not come close to wrecking once and for all our tripartite camaraderie and happiness. It was September now, with the heat of summer still hovering over the sizzling streets of the borough in a fine, lambent haze. Each morning Nathan and Sophie took their separate subway trains at the BMT station on Church Avenue--he to go to his laboratory at Pfizer, she to Dr. Blackstock's office in downtown Brooklyn. And I returned happily to my homely little oaken writing desk. I refused to let Sophie obsess me as a love object, yielding her up willingly again to the older man to whom she so naturally and rightfully belonged, and acquiescing once more in the realization that my claims to her heart had all along been modest and amateurish at best. Thus, with no Sophie to cause me futile woolgathering, I got back to my interrupted novel with brisk eagerness and a lively sense of purpose. Naturally, it was impossible not to remain haunted and, to some extent, intermittently depressed over what Sophie had told me about her past. But generally speaking, I was able to put her story out of my mind. Life does indeed go on. Also, I was caught up in an exhilaratingly creative floodtide and was intensely aware that I had my own tragic chronicle to tell and to occupy my working hours. Possibly inspired by Nathan's financial donation--always the most bracing form of encouragement a creative artist can receive--I began to work at what for me has to be described as runaway speed, correcting and polishing as I went, dulling one after another of my Venus Velvet pencils as five, six, seven, even eight or nine yellow sheets became piled on my desk after a long morning's work. And (totally aside from the money) Nathan returned once more to that role of supportive brother-figure, mentor, constructive critic and all-purpose cherished older friend whom I had so looked up to from the very beginning. Again he began to absorb my exhaustively worked-over prose, taking the manuscript upstairs with him to read after several days' work, when I had acquired twenty-five or thirty pages, and returning a few hours later, usually smiling, almost always ready to bestow upon me the single thing I needed most--praise--though hardly ever praise that was not modified or honestly spiced by a dollop of tough criticism; his eye for the sentence hobbled by an awkward rhythm, for the attitudinized reflection, the onanistic dalliance, the less than felicitous metaphor, was unsparingly sharp. But for the most part I could tell that he was in a straightforward way captivated by my dark Tidewater fable, by the landscape and the weather which I had tried to render with all the passion, precision and affection that it was within my young unfolding talent to command, by the distraught little group of characters taking flesh on the page as I led them on their anxiety-sick, funereal journey across the Virginia lowlands, and, I think, finally and most genuinely by some fresh vision of the South that (despite the influence of Faulkner which he detected and to which I readily admitted) was uniquely and, as he said, "electrifyingly" my own. And I was secretly delighted by the knowledge that subtly, through the alchemy of my art, I seemed gradually to be converting Nathan's prejudice against the South into something resembling acceptance or understanding. I found that he no longer directed at me his jibes about harelips and ringworm and lynchings and rednecks. My work had begun to affect him strongly, and because I so admired and respected him I was infinitely touched by his response. "That party scene at the country club is terrific," he said to me as we sat in my room early one Saturday afternoon. "Just that little scrap of dialogue between the mother and the colored maid--I don't know, it just seems to me right on target. That sense of summer in the South, I don't know how you do it." I preened inwardly, murmuring my thanks, and swallowed part of a can of beer. "It's coming along fairly well," I said, conscious of my strained modesty. "I'm glad you like it, really glad." "Maybe I should go down South," he said, "see what it's like. This stuff of yours whets my appetite. You could be the guide. How would that suit you, old buddy? A trip through the old Confederacy." I found myself positively leaping at the idea. "God, yes!" I said. "That would be just tremendous! We could start in Washington and head on down. I have an old school pal in Fredericksburg who's a great Civil War buff. We could stay with him and visit all the northern Virginia battlefields. Manassas, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania--the whole works. Then we'd get a car and go down to Richmond, see Petersburg, head toward my father's farm down in Southampton County. Pretty soon they'll be harvesting peanuts..." I could tell that Nathan had warmed immediately to this proposal, or endorsement, nodding vigorously while in my own woundup zeal I continued to embellish the outlines of the travelogue. I saw the trip as educative, serious, comprehensive--but fun. After Virginia: the coastal region of North Carolina where my dear old daddy grew up, then Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, and a slow journey through the heart of Dixieland, the sweet bowels of the South--Alabama, Mississippi--finally ending up in New Orleans, where the oysters were plump and juicy and two cents apiece, the gumbo was glorious and the crawfish grew on trees. "What a trip!" I crowed, cutting open another can of beer. "Southern cooking. Fried chicken. Hush puppies. Field peas with bacon. Grits. Collard greens. Country ham with redeye gravy. Nathan, you gourmet, you'll go crazy with happiness!" I was wonderfully high from the beer. The day itself lay nearly prostrate with heat, but a light breeze was blowing from the park and through the fluttering which the breeze made against my windowshade I heard the sound of Beethoven from above. This, of course, was the handiwork of Sophie, home from her half-day's work on Saturday, who always turned on her phonograph full blast while she took a shower. I realized even as I spun out my Southland fantasy that I was laying it on thick, sounding every bit like the professional Southerner whose attitudes I abhorred nearly as much as those of the snotty New Yorker gripped by that reflexive liberalism and animosity toward the South which had given me such a pain in the ass, but it didn't matter; I was exhilarated after a morning of especially fruitful work, and the spell of the South (whose sights and sounds I had so painfully set down, spilling quarts of my heart's blood) was upon me like a minor ecstasy, or a major heartache. I had, of course, experienced this surge of bittersweet time-sorrow often before--most recently when in a seizure considerably less sincere my cornpone blandishments had so notably failed to work their sorcery on Leslie Lapidus--but today the mood seemed especially fragile, quivering, poignant, translucent; I felt that at any moment I might dissolve into unseemly albeit magnificently genuine tears. The lovely adagio from the Fourth Symphony floated down, merging like the serene, steadfast throb of a human pulse with my exalted mood. "I'm with you, old pal," I heard Nathan say from his chair behind me. "You know, it's time I saw the South. Something you said early this summer--it seems so long ago--something you said about the South has stuck with me. Or I guess I should say it has more to do with the North and the South. We were having one of the arguments we used to have, and I remember you said something to the effect that at least Southerners have ventured North, have come to see what the North is like, while very few Northerners have really ever troubled themselves to travel to the South, to look at the lay of the land down there. I remember your saying how smug Northerners appeared to be in their willful and self-righteous ignorance. You said it was intellectual arrogance. Those were the words you used--they seemed awfully strong at the time--but I later began to think about it, began to see that you may be right." He paused for a moment, then with real passion said, "I'll confess to that ignorance. How can I really have hated a place I have never seen or known? I'm with you. We'll take that trip!" "Bless you, Nathan," I replied, glowing with affection and Rheingold. Beer in hand, I had edged into the bathroom to take a leak. I was a little drunker than I had realized. I peed all over the seat. Over the plashing stream I heard Nathan's voice: "I'm due a vacation from the lab in mid-October and by that time the way you're going you should have a big hunk of your book done. You'll probably need a little breathing spell. Why don't we plan for then? Sophie hasn't had a vacation from that quack during the entire time she's worked for him, so she's due a couple of weeks too. I can borrow my brother's car, the convertible. He won't need it, he's bought a new Oldsmobile. We'll drive down to Washington..." Even as he spoke my gaze rested upon the medicine chest--that depository which had seemed so secure until my recent robbery. Who had been the perpetrator, I wondered, now that Morris Fink was absolved of the crime? Some Flatbush prowler, thieves were always around. It no longer really mattered and I sensed that my earlier rage and chagrin were now supplanted by an odd, complex unrest about the purloined cash, which, after all, had been the proceeds of the sale of a human being. Artiste! My grandmother's chattel, source of my own salvation. It was the slave boy Artiste who had provided me with the wherewithal for much of this summer's sojourn in Brooklyn; by the posthumous sacrifice of his flesh and hide he had done a great deal to keep me afloat during the early stages of my book, so perhaps it was divine justice that Artiste would support me no longer. My survival would no more be assured through funds tainted with guilt across the span of a century. I was glad in a way to get shut of such blood money, to get rid of slavery. Yet how could I ever get rid of slavery? A lump rose in my gorge, I whispered the word aloud, "Slavery!" There was dwelling somewhere in the inward part of my mind a compulsion to write
about slavery, to make slavery give up its most deeply buried and tormented secrets, which was every bit as necessary as the compulsion that drove me to write, as I had been writing today, about the inheritors of that institution who now in the 1940s floundered amid the insane apartheid of Tidewater Virginia--my beloved and bedeviled bourgeois New South family whose every move and gesture, I had begun to realize, were played out in the presence of a vast, brooding company of black witnesses, all sprung from the loins of bondage. And were not all of us, white and Negro, still enslaved? I knew that in the fever of my mind and in the most unquiet regions of my heart I would be shackled by slavery as long as I remained a writer. Then suddenly, through a pleasant, lazy, slightly intoxicated mental ramble which led from Artiste to my father to the vision of a white-robed Negro baptism in the muddy river James to my father again, snoring in the Hotel McAlpin--suddenly I thought of Nat Turner, and was riven by a pain of nostalgia so intense that it was like being impaled upon a spear. I removed myself from the bathroom with a lurch and with a sound on my lips that, a little too loudly, startled Nathan with its incoherent urgency. "Nat Turner!" I said. "Nat Turner?" Nathan replied with a puzzled look. "Who in hell is Nat Turner?" "Nat Turner," I said, "was a Negro slave who in the year 1831 killed about sixty white people--none of them, I might add,Jewish boys. He lived not far from my hometown on the James River. My father's farm is right in the middle of the country where he led this bloody revolt of his." And then I began to tell Nathan of the little I knew about this prodigious black figure, whose life and deeds were shrouded in such mystery that his very existence was scarcely remembered by the people of that backwater region, much less the rest of the world. As I spoke, Sophie entered the room, looking scrubbed and fresh and pink and utterly beautiful, and seated herself on the arm of Nathan's chair. She began to listen too, her face sweet and absorbed as she negligently stroked his shoulder. But I was soon finished, for I realized that there was very little I could tell about this man; he had appeared out of the mists of history to commit his gigantic deed in one blinding cataclysmic explosion, then faded as enigmatically as he had come, leaving no explanation for himself, no identity, no after-image, nothing but his name. He had to be discovered anew, and that afternoon, trying to explain him to Nathan and Sophie in my half-drunken excitement and enthusiasm, I realized for the first time that I would have to write about him and make him mine, and re-create him for the world. "Fantastic!" I heard myself cry in beery joy. "You know something, Nathan, I just began to see. I'm going to make a book out of that slave. And the timing is absolutely perfect for our trip. I'll be at a point in this novel where I can feel free to break off--I'll have a whole solid chunk of it down. And so when we get down to Southampton we can ride all over Nat Turner country, talk to people, look at all the old houses. I'll be able to soak up a lot of the atmosphere and also make a lot of notes, collect information. It'll be my next book, a novel about old Nat. Meanwhile, you and Sophie will be adding something very valuable to your education. It'll be one of the most fascinating parts of our trip..." Nathan put his arm around Sophie and gave her an enormous squeeze. "Stingo," he said, "I can't wait. We'll be heading in October for Dixieland." Then he glanced up into Sophie's face. The look of love they exchanged--the merest instant of eyes meeting then melting together, but marvelously intense--was so embarrassingly intimate that I turned briefly away. "Shall I tell him?" he said to Sophie. "Why not?" she replied. "Stingo's our best friend, isn't he?" "And also our best man, I hope. We're going to get married in October!" he said gaily. "So this trip will also be our honeymoon." "God Almighty!" I yelled. "Congratulations!" And I strode over to the chair and kissed them both--Sophie next to her ear, where I was stung by a fragrance of gardenia, and Nathan on his noble blade of a nose. "That's perfectly wonderful," I murmured, and I meant it, having totally forgotten how in the recent past such ecstatic moments with their premonitions of even greater delight had almost always been a brightness that blinded the eyes to onrushing disaster. It must have been ten days or so after this, during the last week of September, that I received a telephone call from Nathan's brother, Larry. I was surprised when one morning Morris Fink summoned me to the greasy pay phone in the hallway--surprised to get any call at all, but especially from a person whom I had so often heard about but never met. The voice was warm and likable--it sounded almost the same as Nathan's with its distinctly Brooklyn resonance--and was casual enough at first but then took on a slight edge of insistence when Larry inquired whether it was possible for us to arrange a meeting, the sooner the better. He said he would prefer not to come to Mrs. Zimmerman's, and therefore would I mind paying him a visit at his home in Forest Hills. He added that I must be aware that all this had to do with Nathan--it was urgent. Without hesitation I said that I would be glad to see him, and we arranged to meet at his place later in the afternoon. I got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of subway tunnels that connects the counties of Kings and Queens, took a wrong bus and found myself in the desolate sprawl of Jamaica, and thus was well over an hour late; but Larry greeted me with enormous courtesy and friendliness. He met me at the door of a large and comfortable apartment in what I took to be a rather fashionable neighborhood. I had almost never encountered anyone for whom I felt such an immediate and positive attraction. He was a bit shorter and distinctly more stocky and fleshed out than Nathan, and of course he was older, resembling his brother in an arresting way; yet the difference between the two was quickly apparent, for where Nathan was all nervous energy, volatile, unpredictable, Larry was calm and soft-spoken, almost phlegmatic, with a reassuring manner which may have been part of his doctor's make-up but which I really think was due to some essential solidity or decency of character. He put me quickly at ease when I tried to apologize for my lateness, and offered me a bottle of Molson's Canadian ale in the most ingratiating manner by saying, "Nathan tells me that you are a connoisseur of malt beverages." And as we sat down on chairs by a spacious open window overlooking a complex of pleasant ivy-colored Tudor buildings, his words helped make me feel that we were already well-acquainted. "I need not tell you that Nathan regards you highly," Larry said, "and really, that's partly why I've asked you to come here. As a matter of fact, in the short time I think he's known you I'm certain that you've become maybe his best friend. He's told me all about your work, what a hell of a good writer he thinks you are. You're tops in his book. There was a time, you know--I guess he must have told you--when he considered writing himself. He could have been almost anything, under the proper circumstances. Anyway, as I'm sure you've been able to tell, he's got very keen literary judgments, and I think it might give you a charge to know that he not only thinks you're writing a swell novel but thinks the world of you as a--well, as a mensh." I nodded, coughing up something noncommittal, and felt a flush of pleasure. God, how eagerly I lapped up such praise! But I still remained puzzled about the purpose of my visit. What I then said, I realize now, inadvertently brought us to focus upon Nathan much more quickly than we might have done had the talk continued in respect to my talent and my sterling personal virtues. "You're right about Nathan. It's really remarkable, you know, to find a scientist who gives a damn about literature, much less has this enormous comprehension of literary values. I mean, here he is--a first-rate research biologist in a huge company like Pfizer--" Larry interrupted me gently, with a smile that could not quite mask the pain behind the expression. "Excuse me, Stingo--I hope I can call you that--excuse me, but I want to tell you this right away, along with the other things you must know. But Nathan is not a research biologist. He is not a bona-fide scientist, and he has no degree of any kind. All that is a simple fabrication. I'm sorry, but you'd better know this." God in heaven! Was I fated to go through life a gullible and simple-minded waif, with those whom I cared for the most forever pulling the wool over my eyes? It was bad enough that Sophie had lied to me so often, now Nathan--"But I don't understand," I began, "do you mean--" "I mean this," Larry put in gently. "I mean that this biologist business is my brother's masquerade--a cover, nothing more than that. Oh, he does report in to Pfizer each day. He does have a job in the company library, an undemanding sinecure where he can do a lot of reading without bothering anyone, and occasionally he does a little research for one of the legitimate biologists on the staff. It keeps him out of harm's way. No one knows about it, least of all that sweet girl of his, Sophie." I was as close to being speechless as I had ever been. "But how..." I struggled for words. "One of the chief officials of the company is a close friend of our father's. Just a very nice favor. It was easy enough to arrange, and when Nathan's in control of himself he apparently does a good job at the little he is required to do. After all, as you well know, Nathan is boundlessly bright, maybe a genius. It's just that most of his life he's been haywire, off the track. I have no doubt that he could have been fantastically brilliant at anything he might have tried out. Writing. Biology. Mathematics. Medicine. Astronomy. Philology. Whatever. But he never got his mind in order." Larry gave again his wan, pained smile and pressed the palms of his hands silently together. "The truth is that my brother's quite mad." "Oh Christ," I murmured. "Paranoid schizophrenic, or so the diagnosis goes, although I'm not at all sure if those brain specialists really know what they're up to. At any rate, it's one of those conditions where weeks, months, even years will go by without a manifestation and then--pow!--he's off. What's aggravated the situation horribly in these recent months is these drugs he's been getting. That's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about." "Oh Christ," I said again. Sitting there, listening to Larry tell me these wretched things with such straightforward resignation and equanimity, I tried to still the turmoil in my brain. I felt stricken by an emotion that was very nearly grief, and I could not have been victim of more shock and chagrin had he told me that Nathan was dying of some incurably degenerative physical disease. I began to stammer, grasping at scraps, straws. "But it's so hard to believe. When he told me about Harvard--" "Oh, Nathan never went to Harvard. He never went to any college. Not that he wasn't more than capable mentally, of course. On his own he's read more books already than I ever will in my lifetime. But when one is as sick as Nathan has been one simply cannot find the continuity to get a formal education. His real schools have been Sheppard Pratt, McLean's, Payne Whitney, and so on. You name the expensive funny farm and he has been a student there." "Oh, it's so goddamned sad and awful," I heard myself whisper. "I knew he was..." I hesitated. "You mean you have known that he was not exactly stable. Not... normal." "Yes," I replied, "I guess any fool could tell that. But I just didn't know how--well, how serious it was." "Once there was a time--a period of about two years when he was in his late teens--when it looked as if he were going to be completely well. It was an illusion, of course. Our parents were living in a fine house in Brooklyn Heights then, it was a year or so before the war. One night after a furious argument Nathan took it into his head to try to burn the house down, and he almost did. That was when we had to put him away for a long period. It was the first time... but not the last." Larry's mention of the war reminded me of a puzzling matter which had nagged at me ever since I had known Nathan but which for one reason or another I had ignored, filing it away in some idle and dusty compartment of my mind. Nathan was, of course, of an age which logically would have required him to spend time in the armed forces, but since he had never volunteered any information about his service, I had left the subject alone, assuming that it was his business. But now I could not resist asking, "What did Nathan do during the war?" "Oh God, he was strictly 4-F. During one of his lucid periods he did try to join up with the paratroopers, but we nipped that one in the bud. He couldn't have served anywhere. He stayed home and read Proust and Newton's Principia. And from time to time paid his visits to Bedlam." I was silent for a long moment, trying to absorb as best I could all this information which validated so conclusively the misgivings I had had about Nathan--misgivings and suspicions which up until now I had successfully repressed. I sat there brooding, silent, and then a lovely dark-haired woman of about thirty entered the room, walked to Larry's side and, touching his shoulder, said, "I'm going out for a minute, darling." When I rose Larry introduced her to me as his wife, Mimi. "I'm so glad to meet you," she said, taking my hand, "I think maybe you can help us with Nathan. You know, we care so much for him. He's talked about you so often that somehow I feel you're a younger brother." I said something mild and accommodating, but before I could add anything else she announced, "I'm going to leave you two alone to talk. I hope I'll see you again." She was stunningly pretty and meltingly pleasant, and as I watched her depart, moving with easy undulant grace across the thick carpet of the room--which for the first time I perceived in all of its paneled, hospitably warm, booklined, unostentatious luxury--my heart gave a heave: Why, instead of the floundering, broke, unpublished writer that I was, couldn't I be an attractive, intelligent, well-paid Jewish urologist with a sexy wife? "I don't know how much Nathan ever told you about himself. Or about our family." Larry poured me another ale. "Not much," I said, momentarily surprised that this indeed was so. "I won't bore you with a great deal of detail, but our father made--well, quite a few bucks. In, of all things, canning kosher soups. When he arrived here from Latvia he spoke not a word of English, and in thirty years he made, well, a bundle. Poor old man, he's in a nursing home