William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (233 page)

“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.”