William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (270 page)

N
ATHAN 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 The two hundred dollars would remain a gift so long as I remained an unpublished writer.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 largesse 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 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 wound-up 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.