Sophie's Choice (6 page)

Your devoted father

Years later I thought that if I had tithed a good part of my proceeds of Artiste's sale to the N.A.A.C.P. instead of keeping it, I might have shriven myself of my own guilt, besides being able to offer evidence that even as a young man I had enough concern for the plight of the Negro as to make a sacrifice. But in the end I'm rather glad I kept it. For these many years afterward, as accusations from black people became more cranky and insistent that as a writer--a lying writer at that--I had turned to my own profit and advantage the miseries of slavery, I succumbed to a kind of masochistic resignation, and thinking of Artiste, said to myself: What the hell, once a racist exploiter always a racist exploiter. Besides, in 1947 I needed $485 as badly as any black man, or Negro, as we said in those days. I stayed long enough at the University Residence Club to receive the check from my father. Given proper management, the money should last me through the summer, which was just beginning, and maybe even into the fall. But where to live? The University Residence Club was no longer for me a possibility, spiritual or physical. The place had reduced me to such a shambles of absolute impotence that I found that I could not even indulge myself in my occasional autoerotic diversions, and was reduced to performing furtive pocket jobs during midnight strolls through Washington Square. My sense of solitariness was verging, I knew, on the pathological, so intensely painful was the isolation I felt, and I suspected that I would be even more lost if I abandoned Manhattan, where at least there were familiar landmarks and amiable Village byways as points of reference to make me feel at home. But I simply could no longer afford either the Manhattan prices or the rent--even single rooms were becoming beyond my means--and so I had to search the classified ads for accommodations in Brooklyn. And that is how, one fine day in June, I got out of the Church Avenue station of the BMT with my Marine Corps seabag and suitcase, took several intoxicating breaths of the pickle-fragrant air of Flatbush, and walked down blocks of gently greening sycamores to the rooming house of Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman. Yetta Zimmerman's house may have been the most open-heartedly monochromatic structure in Brooklyn, if not in all of New York. A large rambling wood and stucco house of the nondescript variety erected, I should imagine, sometime before or just after the First World War, it would have faded into the homely homogeneity of other large nondescript dwellings that bordered on Prospect Park had it not been for its striking--its overwhelming--pinkness. From its second-floor dormers and cupolas to the frames of its basement-level windows the house was unrelievedly pink. When I first saw the place I was instantly reminded of the façade of some back-lot castle left over from the MGM movie version of The Wizard of Oz. The interior also was pink. The floors, walls, ceilings and even most of the furniture of each hallway and room varied slightly in hue--due to an uneven paint job--from the tender rosé of fresh lox to a more aggressive bubble-gum coral, but everywhere there was pink, pink admitting rivalry from no other color, so that after only a few minutes contemplating my prospective room under the proud eye of Mrs. Zimmerman, I felt at first amused--it was a cupid's bower in which one could only barely restrain raucous laughter--and then really grimly trapped, as if I were in a Barricini candy store or the infants' department at Gimbels. "I know, you're thinking about the pink," Mrs. Zimmerman had said, "everybody does. But then it gets you. It wears on you--nice, really nice that is, I mean. Pretty soon, most people they don't want no other color." Without my questioning, she added that her husband, Sol--her late husband--had lucked into a fantastic bargain in the form of several hundred gallons of Navy surplus paint, used for that-- "you know"--and halted, finger quizzically laid aside her porous spatulate nose. "Camouflage?" I ventured. To which she replied, "Yeah, that's it. I guess they didn't have much use for pink on those boats." She said that Sol had painted the house himself. Yetta was squat and expansive, sixty or thereabouts, with a slightly mongoloid cast to her cheerful features that gave her the look of a beaming Buddha. That day I had been persuaded almost at once. First, it was cheap. Then, pink or not, the room she showed me on the ground floor was agreeably spacious, airy, sun-filled, and clean as a Dutch parlor. Furthermore, it possessed the luxury of a kitchenette and a small private bathroom in which the toilet and tub appeared almost jarringlywhite against the prevailing peppermint. I found the privacy itself seduction enough, but there was also a bidet, which lent a risqué note and, electrically, unconscionably stirred my expectations. I also was greatly taken by Mrs. Zimmerman's overview of her establishment, which she expounded as she led me around the premises. "I call this place Yetta's Liberty Hall," she said, every now and then giving me a nudge. "What I like to see is my tenants enjoy life. They're usually young people, my tenants, and I like to see them enjoy life. Not that I don't gotta have rules." She lifted the pudgy nub of a forefinger and began to tick them off. "Rule number one: no playing the radio after eleven o'clock. Rule number two: you gotta turn off all lights when you leave the room, I got no need to pay extra to Con Edison. Rule three: positively no smoking in bed, you get caught smoking in bed--out. My late husband, Sol, had a cousin burned himself up that way, plus a whole house. Rule number four: full week's payment due every Friday. End of the rules! Everything else is Yetta's Liberty Hall. Like what I mean is, this place is for grownups. Understand, I'm running no brothel, but you wanta have a girl in your room once in a while, have a girl in your room. You be a gentleman and quiet and have her out of there at a reasonable hour, you'll have no quarrel with Yetta about a girl in your room. And the same thing goes for the young ladies in my house, if they want to entertain a boyfriend now and then. What's good for the gander is good for the goose, I say, and if there's one thing I hate, it's hypocrisy." This extraordinary broad-mindedness--deriving from what I could only assume was an Old World appreciation of volupté--put the final seal on my decision to move to Yetta Zimmerman's, despite the all too problematical nature of the free hand I had been given. Where would I get a girl? I wondered. Then I was suddenly furious at myself for my lack of enterprise. Certainly the license that Yetta (we were soon on a first-name basis) had given me meant that this important problem would soon take care of itself. The salmon-hued walls seemed to acquire a wanton glow, and I vibrated with inward pleasure. And a few days later I took up residence there, warmly anticipating a summer of carnal fulfillment, philosophical ripening and steady achievement in the creative task I had cut out for myself. My first morning--a Saturday--I rose late and strolled over to a stationery store on Flatbush Avenue and bought two dozen Number 2 Venus Velvet pencils, ten lined yellow legal pads and a "Boston"pencil sharpener, which I got permission from Yetta to screw to the frame of my bathroom door. Then I sat down in a pink straight-backed wicker chair at an oaken desk, also painted pink, whose coarse-grained and sturdy construction reminded me of the desks used by schoolmarms in the grammar-school classrooms of my childhood, and with a pencil between thumb and forefinger confronted the first page of the yellow legal pad, its barrenness baneful to my eye. How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid of inspiration, I found that nothing would come, and although I sat there for half an hour while my mind fiddled with half-jelled ideas and nebulous conceits, I refused to let myself panic at my stagnation; after all, I reasoned, I had barely settled into these strange surroundings. The previous February, during my first few days at the University Residence Club, before starting work at McGraw-Hill, I had written a dozen pages of what I planned to be the prologue of the novel--a description of a ride on a railroad train to the small Virginia city which was to provide the book's locale. Heavily indebted in tone to the opening passages of All the King's Men, using similar rhythms and even the same second-person singular to achieve the effect of the author grabbing the reader by the lapels, the passage was, I knew, to say the least, derivative, yet I also knew that there was much in it that was powerful and fresh. I was proud of it, it was a good beginning, and now I took it out of its manila folder and reread it for perhaps the ninetieth time. It still pleased me and I would not have wanted to change a line. Move over, Warren, this is Stingo arriving, I said to myself. I put it back in its folder. The yellow page remained empty. I felt restless, a little goatish, and in order to keep the curtain drawn down over my brain's everhandy peep show of lewd apparitions--harmless, but in relation to work distracting--I got up and paced the room, which the summer sun bathed in a lurid flamingo light. I heard voices, footsteps in the room above--the walls I realized were paper-thin--and I looked up and glared at the pink ceiling. I began to detest the omnipresent pink and doubted gravely that it would "wear" on me, as Yetta had said. Because of the problems of weight and volume involved, I had brought only what I considered essential books with me; few in number, they included The American College Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, my collection of John Donne, Oates and O'Neill's Complete Greek Drama, the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (essential to my hypochondria), the Oxford Book of English Verse and the Holy Bible. Iknew I could eventually build up my library piecemeal. Meanwhile, now to help summon my own muse, I tried to read Marlowe, but for some reason that lilting music failed to stir me as it usually did. I put the book aside and moseyed into the tiny bathroom, where I began to take inventory of the articles I had placed in the medicine chest. (Years later I would be fascinated to discover a hero of J. D. Salinger duplicating my ceremony, but I claim priority.) This was a ritual, deeply rooted in the soil of inexplicable neurosis and materialistic urgency, which I have gone through many times since when vision and invention have flagged to the point of inertia, and both writing and reading have become burdensome to the spirit. It is a mysterious need to restore a tactile relationship with mere things. One by one with my fingertips I examined them where I had placed them the night before, there on the shelves of the wall cabinet which like everything else had fallen prey to Sol Zimmerman's loony incarnadine paint brush: a jar of Barbasol shaving cream, a bottle of Alka-Seltzer, a Schick injector razor, two tubes of Pepsodent toothpaste, a Dr. West's toothbrush with medium bristles, a bottle of Royall Lyme after-shave lotion, a Kent comb, an "injecto-pack" of Schick injector blades, an unopened cellophane-wrapped box of three dozen rolled and lubricated Trojan condoms with "receptacle tips," a jar of Breck's anti-dandruff shampoo, a tube of Rexall nylon dental floss, a jar of Squibb multivitamins, a bottle of Astring-o-sol mouthwash. I touched them all gently, examined the labels, and even unscrewed the cap of the Royall Lyme shaving lotion and inhaled the fruity citrus aroma, receiving considerable satisfaction from the total medicine-chest experience, which took about a minute and a half. Then I closed the door of the cabinet and returned to my writing table. Sitting down, I lifted my gaze and looked out the window and was suddenly made aware of another element which must have worked on my subconscious and caused me to be drawn to this place. It was such a placid and agreeable view I had of the park, this corner known as the Parade Grounds. Old sycamore trees and maples shaded the sidewalks at the edge of the park, and the dappled sunlight aglow on the gently sloping meadow of the Parade Grounds gave the setting a serene, almost pastoral quality. It presented a striking contrast to remoter parts of the neighborhood. Only short blocks away traffic flowed turbulently on Flatbush Avenue, a place intensely urban, cacophonous, cluttered, swarming with jangled souls and nerves; but here the arboreal greenand the pollen-hazy light, the infrequent trucks and cars, the casual pace of the few strollers at the park's border all created the effect of an outlying area in a modest Southern city--Richmond perhaps, or Chattanooga or Columbia. I felt a sharp pang of homesickness, and abruptly wondered what in God's name was I doing here in the unimaginable reaches of Brooklyn, an ineffective and horny Calvinist among all these Jews? Apropos of which, I took a scrap of paper from my pocket. On it I had scribbled the names of the six other tenants in the house. Each name had been affixed on small cards by the orderly Yetta and attached to the respective doors, and with motive no more suspect than my usual rapacious curiosity I had late the night before, tiptoed about the floors and copied the names down. Five of the occupants were on the floor above, the other in the room opposite me, across the hallway. Nathan Landau, Lillian Grossman, Morris Fink, Sophie Zawistowska, Astrid Weinstein, Moishe Muskatblit. I loved these names for nothing other than their marvelous variety, after the Cunninghams and Bradshaws I had been brought up with. Muskatblit I fancied for a certain Byzantine flavor. I wondered when I would get to know Landau and Fink. The three female names had stirred my intense interest, especially Astrid Weinstein, who was in fascinating proximity across the hall. I was mulling all this over when I was made suddenly aware--in the room directly over my head--of a commotion so immediately and laceratingly identifiable, so instantly, to my tormented ears, apparent in its nature that I will avoid what in a more circumlocutory time might have required obliqueness of suggestion, and take the liberty of saying that it was the sound, the uproar, the frenzy of two people fucking like crazed wild animals. I looked up at the ceiling in alarm. The lamp fixture jerked and wobbled like a puppet on a string. Roseate dust sifted down from the plaster, and I half expected the four feet of the bed to come plunging through. It was terrifying--no mere copulatory rite but a tournament, a rumpus, a free-for-all, a Rose Bowl, a jamboree. The diction was in some form of English, garbled and exotically accented, but I had no need to know the words. What resulted was impressionistic. Male and female, the two voices comprised a cheering section, calling out
such exhortations as I had never heard. Nor had I ever listened to such goads to better effort--to slacken off, to push on, to go harder, faster, deeper--nor such huzzahs over gained first downs, such groans ofdespair over lost yardage, such shrill advice as to where to put the ball. And I could not have heard it more clearly had I been wearing special earphones. Clear it was, and of heroic length. Unending minutes the struggle seemed to last, and I sat there sighing to myself until it was suddenly over and the participants had gone, literally, to the showers. The noise of splashing water and giggles drifted down through the flimsy ceiling, then there were padding footsteps, more giggles, the sharp smack of what sounded like a playful paw upon a bare bottom and finally, incongruously, the ravishing sweet heartbeat of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony from a phonograph. Distraught, I went to the medicine chest and took an Alka-Seltzer. Shortly after I returned to my table I realized that now in the same room above a spirited argument was in progress. It had come with phenomenal speed, this dark and stormy mood. I couldn't hear the words, due to some acoustical quirk. As with the marathon venery just completed, I could hear the action in almost baroque detail but the speech stayed muffled and indistinct, so I got the impression of shuffling angry feet, chairs wrenched around impatiently, banged doors, and voices rising in rage uttering words I was only partly able to comprehend. The male's voice was dominant--a husky and furious baritone that all but drowned out the limpid Beethoven. By contrast the voice of the female seemed plaintive, defensive, growing shrill at moments as if in fright but generally submissive with an undertone of pleading. Suddenly a glass or china object--an ashtray, a tumbler, I knew not what--crashed and shattered against a wall, and I could hear the heavy male feet stamping toward the door, which flew open in the upstairs hallway. Then the door went shut with a tremendous clatter, and I heard the man's footsteps tramping off into one of the other second-floor rooms. Finally the room was left--after these last twenty minutes of delirious activity--in what might be termed provisional silence, amid the depths of which I could hear only the soft heartsick adagio scratching on the phonograph, and the woman's broken sobs on the bed above me. I have always been a discriminating but light eater, and never sit down to breakfast. Being also by habit a late riser, I await the joys of "brunch." After the noise subsided above, I saw that it was past noon and at the same time realized that both the fornication and the fracashad in some urgent, vicarious way made me incredibly hungry, as if I had actually partaken in whatever had taken place up there. I was so hungry that I had begun to salivate, and felt a touch of vertigo. Except for Nescafé and beer, I had not yet stocked either my cupboard or my minuscule refrigerator, so I decided to go out to lunch. During an earlier stroll through the neighborhood there had been a kosher restaurant, Herzl's, on Church Avenue which had caught my eye. I wanted to go there because I had never before tried authentic, that is to say echt, Jewish cuisine and also because--well, When in Flatbush... I said to myself. I shouldn't have bothered, for of course, this being the Sabbath, the place was closed, and I settled on another, presumably non-Orthodox restaurant further down the avenue named Sammy's, where I ordered chicken soup with matzoh balls, gefilte fish and chopped liver--these familiar to me as an offshoot of wide reading in Jewish lore--from a waiter so monumentally insolent that I thought he was putting on an act. (I hadn't then known that surliness among Jewish waiters was almost a definitive trait.) I was not particularly bothered, however. The place was crowded with people, most of them elderly, spooning their borscht and munching at potato pirogen; and a great noise of Yiddish--a venerable roar--filled the dank and redolent air with unfathomable gutturals, as of many wattled old throats gargling on chicken fat. I felt curiously happy, very much in my element. Enjoy, enjoy, Stingo, I said to myself. Like numerous Southerners of a certain background, learning and sensibility, I have from the very beginning responded warmly to Jews, my first love having been Miriam Bookbinder, the daughter of a local ship chandler, who even at the age of six wore in her lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race; and then later I experienced a grander empathy with Jewish folk which, I am persuaded, is chiefly available to those Southerners shattered for years and years by rock-hard encounter with the anguish of Abraham and Moses' stupendous quest and the Psalmist's troubled hosannas and the abyssal vision of Daniel and all the other revelations, bittersweet confections, tall tales and beguiling horrors of the Protestant/Jewish Bible. In addition, it is a platitude by now that the Jew has found considerable fellowship among white Southerners because Southerners have possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb. In any case, sitting there that lunchtime at Sammy's I positively glowed in my new environment, as it dawned on me with no surprise at all that an unconscious urge to be among Jews was at leastpart of the reason for my migration to Brooklyn. Certainly I could not be more deep in the heart of Jewry had I just been set down in Tel Aviv. And leaving the restaurant, I even confessed to myself a liking for Manischewitz, which in fact was lousy as an accompaniment to gefilte fish but bore a syrupy resemblance to the sweet scuppernong wine I had known as a boy in Virginia. As I wandered back to Yetta's house I was a bit upset once more by the happening in the room above me. My concern was largely selfish, for I knew that if such a thing went on too often, I would get little sleep or peace. Another part that bothered me, though, was the strange quality of the event--the jolly athletic amour so obviously and exquisitely enjoyed, yet followed by the precipitous slide into rage, weeping and discontent. Then, too, what further got my goat was the matter of who was doing it to whom. I was irked that I should be thrust into this position of lubricious curiosity, that my introduction to any of my fellow tenants should not be anything so ordinary as a "Hi" and a straightforward handshake but an episode of pornographic eavesdropping upon two strangers whose faces I had never even seen. Despite the fantasy life I have described myself as having led so far during the course of my stay in the metropolis, I am not by nature a snoop; but the very proximity of the two lovers--after all, they had nearly come down on my head--made it impossible for me to avoid trying to discover their identity, and at the earliest feasible moment. My problem was almost immediately solved when I met my first of Yetta's tenants, who was standing in the downstairs hallway, going through the mail which the postman had left on a table near the entrance. He was an amorphously fleshed, slope-shouldered, rather ovoid-looking young man of about twenty-eight, with kinky brick-colored hair and that sullen brusqueness of manner of the New York indigene. During my first days in the city I thought it a manner so needlessly hostile that I was driven several times to acts of near-violence, until I came to realize that it was only one aspect of that tough carapace that urban beings draw about themselves, like an armadillo's hide. I introduced myself politely--"Stingo's the name"--while my fellow roomer thumbed through the mail, and for my pains, got the sound of steady adenoidal breathing. I felt a hot flash at the back of my neck, went numb around the lips, and wheeled about toward my room. Then I heard him say, "This yours?" And as I turned he was holding up a letter. I could tell from the handwriting that it was from my father. "Thanks," I murmured in rage, grabbing the letter. "You mind savin' me the stamp?' he said. "I collect commemoratives." He essayed something in the nature of a grin, not expansive but recognizably human. I made a humming noise and gave him a vaguely positive look. "I'm Fink," he said, "Morris Fink. I more or less take care of this place, especially when Yetta's away, like she is this weekend. She went to visit her daughter in Canarsie." He nodded in the direction of my door. "I see you got to live in the crater." "The crater?" I said. "I lived there up until a week ago. When I moved out that's how you got to move in. I called it the crater because it was like livin' in a bomb crater with all that humpin' they were doin' in that room up above." There had been suddenly established a bond between Morris and me, and I relaxed, filled with inquisitive zeal. "How did you put up with it, for God's sake? And tell me--who the hell are they?" "It's not so bad if you get them to move the bed. They do that--move it over toward the wall--and you can barely hear them humpin'. Then it's over the bathroom. I got them to do that. Or him, that is. I got him to move it even though it's her room. I insisted. I said Yetta would throw them both out if he didn't, so he finally agreed. Now I guess he's moved it back toward the window. He said something about it bein' cooler there." He paused to accept one of the cigarettes I had offered him. "What you should do is ask him to move the bed back toward the wall again." "I can't do that," I put in, "I just can't go up to some guy, some stranger, and say--well, you know what I'd have to say to him. It would be terribly embarrassing. I just couldn't. And which ones are they, anyway?" "I'll tell him if you'd like," said Morris, with an air of assurance that I found appealing. "I'll make him do it. Yetta can't stand it around here if people annoy each other. That Landau is a weird one, all right, and he might give me some trouble, but he'll move the bed, don't you worry. He doesn't want to get thrown out on his ass." So it was Nathan Landau, the first name on my list, who I realized was the master of this setup; then who was his partner in all that din, sin and confusion? "And the gal?" I inquired. "Miss Grossman?" "No. Grossman's a pig. It's the Polish broad, Sophie. Sophie Z., I call her. Her last name, it's impossible to pronounce. But she's some dish, that Sophie." I was aware once more of the silence of the house, the eerie impression I was to get from time to time that summer of a dwelling far removed from the city streets, of a place remote, isolated, almost bucolic. Children called from the park across the way and I heard a single car pass by slowly, its sound unhurried, inoffensive. I simply could not believe I was living in Brooklyn. "Where is everybody?" I asked. "Well, let me tell you something," said Morris. "Except maybe for Nathan, nobody in this joint has enough money to really do anything. Like go to New York and dance at the Rainbow Room or anything fancy like that. But on Saturday afternoon they all clear out of here. They all go somewhere. For instance, the Grossman pig--boy, is she some fuckin' yenta--Grossman goes to visit her mother out in Islip. Ditto Astrid. That's Astrid Weinstein, lives right there across the hall from you. She's a nurse at Kings County Hospital like Grossman, only she's no pig. A nice kid, but I would say not exactly a knockout. Plain. A dog, really. But not a pig." My heart sank. "And she goes to see her mother, too?" I said with scant interest. "Yeah, she goes to see her mother, only in New York. I can somehow tell you're not Jewish, so let me tell you something about Jewish people. They very often have to go see their mothers. It's a trait." "I see," I said. "And the others? Where have they gone?" "Muskatblit--you'll see him, he's big and fat and a rabbinical student--Moishe goes to see his mother and his father, somewhere in Jersey. Only he can't travel on the Sabbath, so he leaves here Friday night. He's a big movie fiend, so Sunday he spends all day in New York goin' to four or five movies. Then he gets back here late Sunday night half blind from goin' to all those movies." And, ah--Sophie and Nathan? Where do they go? And what do they do, by the way, aside from--" I was on the verge of an obvious jest but held my tongue, a point lost in any case, since Morris, so garrulous, so fluently and freely informative, had anticipated what I had been wondering and was rapidly filling me in. "Nathan's got an education, he's a biologist. He works in a laboratory near Borough Hall where they make medicine and drugs and things like that. Sophie Z., I don't know what she does exactly. I heard she's some kind of receptionist for a Polish doctor who's got a whole lot of Polish clients. Naturally, she speaks Polish like a native. Anyway, Nathan and Sophie are beach nuts. When the weather's good, like now, they go to Coney Island--sometimes Jones Beach. Then they come back here." He paused and made what seemed to approximate a leer. "They come back here and hump and fight. Boy, do they fight! Then they go out to dinner. They're very big on good eating. That Nathan, he makes good money, but he's a weird one, all right. Weird. Real weird. Like, I think he needs psychiatric consultation." A phone rang, and Morris let it ring. It was a pay phone attached to the wall, and its ring seemed exceptionally loud, until I realized that it must have been adjusted in such a way as to be heard all over the house. "I don't answer it when nobody's here," Morris said. "I can't stand that miserable fuckin' phone, all those messages. 'Is Lillian there? This is her mother. Tell her she forgot the precious gift her Uncle Bennie brought her.' Yatata yatata. The pig. Or, 'This is the father of Moishe Muskatblit. He's not in? Tell him his cousin Max got run down by a truck in Hackensack.' Yatata yatata all day long. I can't stand that telephone." I told Morris I would see him again, and after a few more pleasantries, retired to my room's nursery-pink and the disquietude that it had begun to cause me. I sat down at my table. The first page of the legal pad, its blankness still intimidating, yawned in front of me like a yellowish glimpse of eternity. How in God's name would I ever be able to write a novel? I mused, chewing on a Venus Velvet. I opened the letter from my father. I always looked forward to these letters, feeling fortunate to have this Southern Lord Chesterfield as an advisor, who so delighted me with his old-fashioned disquisitions upon pride and avarice and ambition, bigotry, political skulduggery, venereal excess and other mortal sins and dangers. Sententious he might occasionally be, but never pompous, never preacherish in tone, and I relished both the letters' complexity of thought and feeling and their simple eloquence; whenever I finished one I was usually close to tears, or doubled over with laughter,