William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (248 page)

It was then that I witnessed an episode which illustrated the sad, schismatic division of North and South more starkly than any conceivable work of art or sociology. And it involved two grievous, mutually unpardonable mistakes, each embedded in a cultural overview which was separated from the other as Saskatoon is from Patagonia. The initial mistake surely was my father’s. Although gratuities in the South—at least up until that time—had been in general eschewed or never taken seriously, he should have known better than to tip Thomas McGuire a nickel—wiser to give no tip at all. McGuire’s mistake was to react by snarling at my father, descriptively: “fucking asshole.” This is not to say that a
Southern
cabdriver, unaccustomed to tips or at any rate accustomed to receiving few tips and those erratically, might not have felt a little stung; yet however violently he might have bristled inwardly, he would have kept his peace. Nor does it mean that the ears of a New Yorker might not have burned at McGuire’s epithet; but such words are the common coin of the streets and of taxi drivers, and most New York denizens would have swallowed their gall and likewise kept their mouths shut.

Partway out of the cab, my father poked his nose back into the front window and said, in a nearly incredulous voice, “What did I hear you say?” The phrasing is important—not “What did you say?” or “What’s that you said?” but with the emphasis on “hear,” a sense that the auditory apparatus itself had never before experienced such vile obscenities, not even separately, much less uttered in tandem. McGuire was a blur of thick neck and reddish hair in the shadows. I did not get a good look at his face, but the voice was fairly young. If he had sped off into the night, then all might have been well, but although I sensed a slight hesitancy, I also felt an intransigence, a feisty Hibernian umbrage at my father’s nickel that matched the old man’s rage at this indefensible language. When McGuire answered he even supplied a considerably more grammatical shape to his thought:
“I said you must be some fucking asshole.”

My father’s voice became a restrained cry—not really loud but throbbing with fury—as he sought retribution. “And I think
you
must be part of the bottomless dregs of this loathsome city that spawned you and all your foul-mouthed breed!” he declaimed, shifting like lightning into the timeless rhetorical mode of his ancestors. “Detestable scum that you are, you are no more civilized than a sewer rat! In any decent place in the United States a person like you disgorging your disgusting filth would be taken out in a public square and horsewhipped!” His voice rose a bit; pedestrians halted beneath the McAlpin’s blazing marquee. “But this is neither a decent nor a civilized place, and you are free to spew your putrid language upon fellow citizens—” He was cut off then in mid-torrent by McGuire’s hasty escape as he rammed the cab forward, barreling off up the avenue. Clutching at air, my father wheeled about toward the sidewalk, and I was aware in a flash that it was nothing but sheer whirling momentum which then propelled him like a blind man into the upright hard steel shaft of a No Parking stanchion; the sound of his head making contact, as in an animated cartoon, produced a vibrating
boinnng!
But it was not at all amusing. I thought there was going to be a denouement of tragic scope.

Yet there he was, half an hour later, sipping straight bourbon and railing against the North’s “patent on virtue.” He had bled a lot, but by the sheerest chance the “house doctor” of the McAlpin had been roaming through the lobby just at the moment that I shepherded the victim in. The house doctor appeared to be a seedy alcoholic, but he knew how to take care of a shiner. Cold water and a bandage had finally stanched the blood, though not the old man’s outrage. Nursing his wound in the shadows of the McAlpin bar, with his swollen eye looking more and more the simulacrum of his own father divested of half his sight eighty-odd years before at Chancellorsville, he continued to curse Thomas McGuire’s guts in a litany of hopeless spleen. It got to be a little tiresome, picturesque as the language was, and I realized that the old man’s ire was founded upon neither snobbishness nor prudery—as a shipyard worker and, before that, as a merchant mariner, his ears had surely overflowed with such billingsgate—but upon something as uncomplicated as an abiding belief in good manners and public decency.
“Fellow citizens!”
It actually was a kind of frustrated egalitarianism out of which, I began to understand, he derived much of his sense of alienation. Simply put, people abrogated their equality when they were unable to speak to each other in human terms. Calming down, he abandoned McGuire finally and let his animus spread out and embrace in a general way all the multifarious sins and failings of the North: its arrogance, its hypocritical claim to moral superiority. Suddenly I saw how much of an unreconstructed Southerner he really was, and was struck by the fact that this seemed in no way to contradict his basic liberalism.

At last the diatribe—perhaps combined with the shock of his injury, relatively slight as it was—appeared to exhaust him; he turned pale and I urged him to go upstairs to bed. This he reluctantly did, stretching himself out on one of the twin beds of the room he had reserved for the two of us five floors above the noisy avenue. I was to spend two restlessly insomniac and (largely because of my continuing despair over Sophie and Nathan) demoralized nights there, awash with sweat beneath a humming black spider of an electric fan that dispensed air in puny puffs. In spite of his fatigue, my father kept harping on the South. (I realized later that at least part of his visit was in effect a subtle mission to rescue me from the clutches of the North; although he never let on in direct terms, the old slyboots had surely dedicated much of his trip to an attempt to preserve me from going over to the Yankees.) That first night his last thoughts before he went off to sleep had to do with his hope that I would leave this confusing city and come back down to the country where I belonged. His voice was faraway as it mumbled something about “human dimensions.”

The several days were spent just as one might imagine a twenty-two-year-old youth would while away the hours with a generally discontented Southern daddy during a New York summer. We visited a couple of tourist attractions which both of us confessed to never having visited before: the Statue of Liberty and the roof of the Empire State Building. We took a sightseeing boat trip around Manhattan. We went to the Radio City Music Hall, drowsing there through a comedy with Robert Stack and Evelyn Keyes. (I recall how, during this ordeal, my mourning over Sophie and Nathan enveloped me like a shroud.) We looked in at the Museum of Modern Art, a place which, rather condescendingly, I thought might offend the old man, who instead seemed thoroughly exhilarated—the clean bright orthogonal Mondrians bringing special delight to his technician’s eye. We ate at Horn and Hardart’s amazing automat, at Nedick’s and Stouffer’s and—in a fling at what in those days I deemed
haute cuisine
—at a midtown Longchamps. We went to one or two bars (including, accidentally, a gay joint on Forty-second Street, where I watched my father’s face, as it confronted the smirking apparitions, turn gray like oatmeal, then become actually disfigured with unbelief), but each night retired early, after more talk about that farm nestled amid the Tidewater peanut fields. My father snored. Oh God, how he snored! The first night I was somehow able to drowse off once or twice through those mighty snorts and gulps. But now I recollect how these prodigious snores (product of a deviated septum, they had been his lifelong bane, and their cannonade through open windows on summer evenings had been known to arouse neighbors) became during the last night part of the very fabric of my insomnia and formed a turbulent counterpoint to the hectic drift of my thought: to a fleeting but bitter seizure of guilt, to a spasm of erotic mania that swooped down on me like some all-devouring succubus, and finally to a wrenching, sweet, nearly intolerable memory of the South which kept me awake through the whitening hours of dawn.

Guilt. Lying there, I realized that as a boy my father had never punished me severely except once—and then only because of a crime for which I sublimely deserved reprisal. It had to do with my mother. In the year before she died, when I was twelve, the cancer which had been devouring my mother began to filter into her bones. One day her weakened leg gave way; she fell and broke the lower bone, the tibia, which never mended. Thereafter she had to wear a brace and walked haltingly with a cane. She disliked lying in bed and preferred to sit when she could. Whenever she sat it was with her leg outstretched in its brace, propped on a stool or an ottoman. She was then only fifty, and I was aware that she knew she was going to die; I sometimes saw the fear. My mother read books incessantly—books were her narcotic until that time when the intolerable pain began and real narcotics replaced Pearl Buck—and my strongest memory of her during that last period of her life is of the gray head above the gentle, bespectacled, wasting face bent over
You Can’t Go Home Again
(she had been a devoted fan long before I had read a word of Wolfe, but she also read best sellers with ornate titles—
Dust Be My Destiny, The Sun Is My Undoing),
a portrait of absorbed and placid contemplation and as domestically commonplace in her way as a study by Vermeer, save for the wicked metal brace propped on its footstool. I also remember a certain venerable frayed and patterned afghan which in cold weather she used to cover her lap and the imprisoned leg. Truly low temperatures almost never beset that part of the Virginia Tidewater but it could become briefly, achingly cold in the nasty months, and because it came rarely, the cold always surprised. In our tiny house we had a weak coal-burning furnace in the kitchen, supplemented in the living room by a toy fireplace.

It was on a sofa in front of this fireplace that my mother lay reading on winter afternoons. As an only child, I was classically though not immoderately spoiled; one of the few chores demanded of me, on afternoons after school during the winter months, was that I hurry home and see to it that the fireplace was well fueled, since although my mother was not yet totally incapacitated, it was far beyond her strength to throw wood on a fire. There was a telephone, but in an adjoining room, down steps she could not negotiate. Already it must be easy to guess the nature of the outrage I committed: one afternoon I abandoned her. I was lured away by the promise of a ride with a schoolmate and his grown-up brother in a new Packard Clipper, one of the swank cars of the day. I was mad for that car. I was drunk with its vulgar elegance. We streaked with idiot vainglory through the frosty countryside, and as the afternoon faded and evening fell, so did the mercury; at about five o’clock the Clipper halted somewhere far from home out in the pinewoods and I became aware of the sudden descent of windy, vicious cold. And for the first time I thought of the hearth, and my deserted mother, and became sick with alarm. Jesus Christ,
guilt
...

Ten years later, lying in bed on the fifth floor of the McAlpin and listening to my father snore, I reflected with a stab of anguish upon my guilt (ineffaceable to that very moment), but it was anguish mingled with a queer tender gratitude for the grace with which the old man had confronted and dealt with my dereliction. Ultimately (and I don’t think I have alluded to this) he was a Christian, of the charitable variety. That gray late afternoon—I remember the pinpricks of snow which began to dance in the wind as the Packard rushed homeward—my father returned from work and was at my mother’s side half an hour before I got there. When I arrived he was muttering to himself and massaging her hands. The stucco walls of the modest little house had let winter enter like a foul marauder. The fire had hours before died out and he found her shivering helplessly beneath her afghan, her lips bitter and livid, her face chalky-dry with cold but also fright. The room bloomed with smoke from a smoldering log she had tried futilely to shove onto the fire with her cane. God knows what Eskimo ice-floe visions had engulfed her when she sank back amid her best sellers, all those bloated books of the month with which she had tried to barricade herself against death, propped her leg up on the stool with the onerous two-handed hitching motion I remembered, and felt the rods of the metal brace slowly grow as chill as stalactites against that wretched, useless, carcinoma-riddled limb. When I burst through the doorway, I recollect, one impression captured my soul so completely as to seem to envelop the room: her eyes. Those hazel bespectacled eyes and the way that her ravaged, still terrified gaze caught my own, then darted swiftly away. It was the
swiftness
of that turning away which would thereafter define my guilt; it was as swift as a machete dismembering a hand. And I realized with horror how much I resented her burdensome affliction. She wept then, and I wept, but separately, and we listened to each other’s weeping as if across a wide and desolate lake.

I am certain that my father—so ordinarily mild and forbearing—said something harsh, scathing. But it was not his words that I ever remembered, only the cold—the blood-congealing cold and darkness of the woodshed where he marched me and where he made me stay until long after darkness fell over the village and frigid moonlight seeped in through the cracks of my cell. How long I shivered and wept there I cannot recall. I was only aware that I was suffering exactly in the same way that my mother had and that my deserts could scarcely be more fitting; no malefactor ever endured his punishment with less rancor. I suppose I was incarcerated for no more than two hours, but I would willingly have stayed there until dawn or, indeed, until I had frozen to death—so long as I was able to expiate my crime. Could it have been that my father’s sense of justice had instinctively responded to this need in me for such a fitting atonement? Whatever—and in his calm unflustered way he had done his best—my crime was ultimately beyond expiation, for in my mind it would inescapably and always be entangled in the sordid animal fact of my mother’s death.

She died a disgusting death, in a transport of pain. Amid the heat of July, seven months later, she faded away in a stupor of morphine, while all the night before, I pondered over and over those feeble embers in the cold smoky room and speculated with dread on the notion that my abandonment that day had sent her into the long decline from which she never recovered. Guilt. Hateful guilt. Guilt, corrosive as brine. Like typhoid, one can harbor for a lifetime the toxin of guilt. Even as I writhed on the McAlpin’s damp and lumpy mattress, grief drove like a spear of ice through my chest when I recaptured the fright in my mother’s eyes, wondered once again if that ordeal had not somehow hastened her dying, wondered if she ever forgave me. Fuck it, I thought. Prompted by a commotion next door, I began to think of sex.