Sophie's Choice Page 10
Yet beneath my grand mood I was able to sense that there was something wrong. The terrible scene between Sophie and Nathan the night before should have been warning enough to me that our chummy little get-together, with its laughter and its ease and its gentle intimacy, was scarcely true of the status quo as it existed between them. But I am a person who is too often weakly misguided by the external masquerade, quick to trust in such notions as that the ghastly blow-up I had witnessed was a lamentable but rare aberration in a lovers’ connection whose prevailing tone was really hearts and flowers. I suppose the fact of the matter is that deep down I so hungered for friendship—was so infatuated with Sophie, and attracted with such perverse fascination to this dynamic, vaguely outlandish, wickedly compelling young man who was her inamorato—that I dared not regard their relationship in anything but the rosiest light. Even so, as I say, I could feel something distinctly out of joint. Beneath all the jollity, the tenderness, the solicitude, I sensed a disturbing tension in the room. I don’t mean that the tension at that moment directly involved the two lovers. But there was tension, an unnerving strain, and most of it seemed to emanate from Nathan. He had become distracted, restless, and he got up and fiddled with the phonograph records, replaced the Handel with Vivaldi again, in obvious turmoil gulped a glass of water, sat down and drummed his fingers against his pants leg in rhythm to the celebrant horns.
Then swiftly he turned to me, peering at me searchingly with his troubled and gloomy eyes, and said, “Just an old briar-hopper, ain’t you?” After a pause and with a touch of the bogus drawl he had baited me with before, he added, “You know, you Confederate types interest me. You-all”—and here he bore down on the “all”—“you-all interest me very, very much.”
I began to do, or undergo, or experience what I believe is known as a slow burn. This Nathan was incredible! How could he be so clumsy, so unfeeling—such a creep? My euphoric haze evaporated like thousands of tiny soap bubbles all at once. This swine! I thought. He had actually trapped me! How otherwise to explain this sly change in mood, unless it was to try to edge me into a corner? It was either clumsiness or craft: there was no other way to fathom such words, after I had so emphatically and so recently made it a condition of our amity—if such it might be called—that he would lay off his heavy business about the South. Once more indignation rose like a regurgitated bone in my gorge, though I made a last attempt to be patient. I turned up the butane under my Tidewater accent and said, “Why, Nathan ole hoss, you Brooklyn folks interest us boys down home, too.”
This had a distinctly adverse effect on Nathan. He was not only unamused, his eyes flashed warfare; he glowered at me with implacable mistrust, and for an instant I could have sworn I saw in those shining pupils the freak, the redneck, the alien he knew me to be.
“Oh, fuck it,” I said, starting to rise to my feet. “I’ll just be going—”
But before I could set down my glass and get up he had clutched me by the wrist. It was not a rough or painful grasp, but he bore down strongly nonetheless, and insistently, and his grip held me fast in the chair. There was something desperately importunate in that grip which chilled me.
“It’s hardly a joking matter,” he said. His voice, though restrained, was, I felt, charged with turbulent emotion. Then his next words, spoken with deliberate, almost comical slowness, were like an incantation. “Bobby... Weed... Bobby Weed! Do you think Bobby Weed is worthy of nothing more than your attempt... at... humor?”
“It wasn’t I who started that cotton-picking accent,” I retorted. And I thought: Bobby Weed! Oh shit! Now he’s going to get on Bobby Weed. Let me out of here.
Then at this moment Sophie, as if sensing the perhaps sinister shift in Nathan’s mood, hurried to his side and touched his shoulder with a fluttery, nervously placating hand. “Nathan,” she said, “no more about Bobby Weed. Please, Nathan! It will just disturb you when we were having such a lovely time.” She cast me a look of distress. “All week he’s been talking about Bobby Weed. I can’t get him to stop.” To Nathan again she begged, “Please, darling, we were having such a lovely time!”
But Nathan was not to be deflected. “What about Bobby Weed?” he demanded of me.
“Well, what about him, for Christ’s sake?” I groaned, and pulled myself upward out of his grasp. I had begun to eye the door and the intervening furniture, and quickly schemed out the best way of immediate exit. “Thanks for the beer,” I muttered.
“I’ll tell you what about Bobby Weed,” Nathan persisted. He was not about to allow me off the hook, and dumped more foaming beer into the glass which he pressed into my hand. His expression still seemed calm enough but was betrayed by inner excitement in the form of a waggling, hairy, didactic forefinger which he thrust into my face. “I’ll tell you something about Bobby Weed, Stingo my friend. And that is this! You Southern white people have a lot to answer for when it comes to such bestiality. You deny that? Then listen. I say this as one whose people have suffered the death camps. I say this as a man who is deeply in love with one who survived them.” He reached up and surrounded Sophie’s wrist with his hand while the forefinger of his other hand still made its vermiform scrawl in the air above my cheekbone. “But mainly I say this as Nathan Landau, common citizen, research biologist, human being, witness to man’s inhumanity to man. I say that the fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do you agree with me?”
I bit the inside of my mouth in an effort to keep my composure. “What happened to Bobby Weed, Nathan,” I replied, “was horrible. Unspeakable! But I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would you mind taking your finger out of my face?” I felt my brow growing moist and feverish. “And I damn well question this big net you’re trying to throw out to catch all of what you call you Southern white people. Goddamnit, I’m not going to swallow that line! I’m Southern and I’m proud of it, but I’m not one of those pigs—those troglodytes who did what they did to Bobby Weed! I was born in Tidewater Virginia, and if you’ll pardon the expression, I regard myself as a gentleman! Also, if you’ll pardon me, this simplistic nonsense of yours, this ignorance coming from somebody so obviously intelligent as yourself truly nauseates me!” I heard my voice climb, quavering, cracked and no longer under control, and I feared another disastrous coughing fit as I watched Nathan calmly rising to his full height, so that in effect we were confronting each other. Despite the now rather threatful forward-thrusting nature of his stance and the fact that he outmanned me in bulk and stature, I had the powerful urge to punch him in the jaw. “Nathan, let me tell you something. You are now dealing in the cheapest kind of New York-liberal, hypocritical horseshit! What gives you the right to pass judgment on millions of people, most of whom would die before they’d harm a Negro!”
“Ha!” he replied. “See, it’s even in your speech pattern’ Nig-ro! I find that so offensive.”
“It’s the way we say it down there. It’s not meant to offend. All right—Knee-grow. Anyway,” I went on impatiently, “what gives you the right to pass judgment? I find that so offensive.”
“As a Jew, I regard myself as an authority on anguish and suffering.” He paused and as he gazed at me now I thought I saw for the first time contempt in his look, and mounting disgust. “As for this ‘New York-liberal’ evasion, this ‘hypocritical horseshit’—I consider that a laughably feeble, insubstantial comeback to an honest accusation. Aren’t you able to perceive the simple truth? Aren’t you able to discern the truth in its awful outlines? And that is that your refusal to admit responsibility in the death of Bobby Weed is the same as that of those Germans who disavowed the Nazi party even as they watched blandly and unprotestingly as the thugs vandalized the synagogues and perpetrated the Kristallnacht. Can’t you see the truth about yourself? About the South? After all, it wasn’t the citizens of New York Stat
e who destroyed Bobby Weed.”
Most of what he was saying—especially about my “responsibility”—was lopsided, irrational, smug and horrendously wrong, yet to my nearly total chagrin at that point, I found that I could not answer. I was momentarily demoralized. I made an odd chirping sound in the back of my throat and moved in a sort of weak-kneed graceless lurch toward the window. Feeble, impotent though inwardly raging, I struggled for words that would not come. I swilled at a gulp the larger part of a glass of beer, looking through eyes bleared with frustration down at the sunny pastoral lawns of Flatbush, the rustling sycamores and maples, decorous streets all gently astir with Sunday-morning motion: shirt-sleeved ball-throwers, churning bicycles, sun-dappled strollers on the walks. The scent of new-mown grass was rank, sweet, warmly green to the nostrils, reminding me of countryside prospects and distances—fields and lanes perhaps not too different from those once meandered upon by the young Bobby Weed, whom Nathan had implanted like a pulsing lesion in my brain. And as I thought of Bobby Weed, I was overtaken by bitter, disabling despair. How could this infernal Nathan summon up the shade of Bobby Weed on such a ravishing day?
I listened to Nathan’s voice behind me, high now, hectoring, reminiscent of that of a squat, half-hysteric Communist youth organizer with a mouth like a torn pocket I had once heard screaming up at the empty empyrean over Union Square. “The South today has abdicated any right to connection with the human race,” Nathan harangued me. “Each white Southerner is accountable for the tragedy of Bobby Weed. No Southerner escapes responsibility!”
I shivered violently, my hand jerked, and I watched my beer slosh greasily in its glass. Nineteen forty-seven. One, nine, four, seven. In that summer, twenty years almost to the month before the city of Newark burned down, and Negro blood flowed incarnadine in the gutters of Detroit, it was possible—if one was Dixie-born and sensitive and enlightened and aware of one’s fearsome and ungodly history—to smart beneath such a tongue-lashing, even when one knew that it partook heavily of renascent abolitionist self-righteousness, ascribing to itself moral superiority so hygienic as to provoke tolerant though mirthless amusement. In less violent form, in subtle digs and supercilious little drawing-room slanders, Southerners who had ventured north were to endure such exploitative assaults upon their indwelling guilt during an era of unalleviated discomfort which ended officially on a morning in August, 1963, when on North Water Street in Edgartown, Massachusetts, the youngish, straw-haired, dimple-kneed wife of the yacht-club commodore, a prominent Brahmin investment banker, was seen brandishing a copy of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time as she uttered to a friend, in tones of clamp-jawed desolation, these words: “My dear, it’s going to happen to all of us!”
This understatement could not have seemed quite so omniscient to me back then in 1947. At that time the drowsing black behemoth, although beginning to stir, was still not regarded as much of a Northern problem. Perhaps for this very reason—although I might honestly have bridled at the intolerant Yankee slurs that had sometimes come my way (even good old Farrell had gotten in a few mildly caustic licks)—I did feel at my heart’s core a truly burdensome shame over the kinship I was forced to acknowledge with those solidly Anglo-Saxon subhumans who were the torturers of Bobby Weed. These Georgia backwoodsmen—denizens, as it so happened, of that same piney coast near Brunswick where my savior Artiste had toiled and suffered and died—had made sixteen-year-old Bobby Weed one of the last and certainly one of the most memorably wiped-out victims of lynch justice the South was to witness. His reputed crime, very much resembling that of Artiste, had been so classic as to take on the outlines of a grotesque cliché: he had ogled, or molested, or otherwise interfered with (actual offense never made clear, though falling short of rape) the simpleton daughter, named Lula—another cliché! but true: Lula’s woebegone and rabbity face had sulked from the pages of six metropolitan newspapers—of a crossroads storekeeper, who had instigated immediate action by an outraged daddy’s appeal to the local rabble.
I had read of the peasantry’s medieval vengeance only a week before, while standing on an uptown Lexington Avenue local, squashed between an enormously fat woman with an S. Klein shopping bag and a small Popsicle-licking Puerto Rican in a busboy’s jacket whose gardenia-ripe brilliantine floated sweetishly up to my nose as he mooned over my Mirror, sharing with me its devil’s photographs. While he was still alive Bobby Weed’s cock and balls had been hacked off and thrust into his mouth (this feature not displayed), and when near death, though reportedly aware of all, had by a flaming blowtorch received the brand on his chest of a serpentine “L”—representing what? “Lynch?” “Lula?” “Law and Order?” “Love?” Even as Nathan raved at me, I recalled having semi-staggered out of the train and up into the bright summer light of Eighty-sixth Street, amid the scent of Wienerwurst and Orange Julius and scorched metal from the subway gratings, moving blindly past the Rossellini movie I had traveled that far to see. I did not go to the theatre that afternoon. Instead, I found myself at Gracie Square on the promenade by the river, gazing as if in a trance at the municipal hideousness of the river islands, unable to efface the mangled image of Bobby Weed from my mind even as I kept murmuring—endlessly it seemed—lines from Revelation I had memorized as a boy: And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain... Perhaps it had been an overreaction, but—ah God, even so, I could not weep.
Nathan’s voice, still badgering me, swam back into hearing. “Look, in the concentration camps the brutes in charge would not have stooped to that bestiality!”
Would they? Would they not? It seemed hardly to matter, and I was sick of the argument, sick of the fanaticism I was unable to counter or find shelter from, sick with the vision of Bobby Weed and—despite feeling no complicity whatever in the Georgia abomination—suddenly sick with a past and a place and a heritage I could neither believe in nor fathom. I had the idle urge now—at risk of a broken nose—to heave the rest of my beer in Nathan’s face. Restraining myself, I tensed my shoulders and said in tones of frosty contempt, “As a member of a race which has been unjustly persecuted for centuries for having allegedly crucified Christ, you—yes, you, goddamnit!—should be aware of how inexcusable it is to condemn any single people for anything!” And then I found myself so enraged that I blurted out something which to Jews, in that tormented bygone year scant months removed from the crematoriums, was freighted with enough incendiary offensiveness to make me regret the words as soon as they escaped my lips. But I didn’t take them back. “And that goes for any people,” I said, “by God, even the Germans!”
Nathan flinched, then reddened even more deeply, and I thought that the showdown had finally arrived. Just then, however, Sophie miraculously salvaged the entire cheerless situation by swooping down in her campus-cutup costume and inserting herself between the two of us.
“Stop this talk right now,” she demanded. “Stop it! It is too serious for Sunday.” There was playfulness in her manner but I could tell she meant business. “Forget Bobby Weed. We must talk about happy things. We must go to Coney Island and swim and eat and have a lovely time!” She whirled on the glowering golem and I was surprised and considerably relieved to see how readily she was able to discard her wounded, submissive role and actually stand up to Nathan in a frisky way, beginning to manipulate him out of sheer charm, beauty and brio. “What do you know about concentration camps, Nathan Landau? Nothing at all. Quit talking about such places. And quit shouting at Stingo. Quit shouting at Stingo about Bobby Weed. Enough! Stingo didn’t have anything to do with Bobby Weed. Stingo’s sweet. And you’re sweet, Nathan Landau, and vraiment, je t’adore.”
I noticed that summer that under certain circumstances having to do with the mysterious vicissitudes of his mind and mood, Sophie was able to work upon Nathan such tricks of alchemy that he was almost instantaneously transformed—the ranting ogre become Prince Charming. European women often b
oss their men too, but with a beguiling subtlety unknown to most American females. Now she pecked him lightly on the cheek, and holding his outstretched hands by her fingertips, stared at him appraisingly as the beet-hued, choleric passion he had vented on me began to recede from his face.
“Vraiment, je t’adore, chéri,” she said softly and then, tugging at his wrists, sang out in the most cheery voice of the day, “To the beach! To the beach! We’ll build sand castles.”
And the tempest was over, the thunderclouds had rolled away, and the sunniest good humor flooded into the color-splashed room, where the curtains made a tap-tapping sound upon a sudden gusty breeze from the park. As we moved toward the door, the three of us, Nathan—looking a bit like a fashionable gambler now in his suit out of an old Vanity Fair—looped his long arm around my shoulder and offered me an apology so straightforward and honorable that I could not help but forgive him his dark insults, his bigoted and wrong-headed slurs and his other transgressions. “Old Stingo, I’m just an ass, an ass!” he roared in my ear, uncomfortably loud. “I don’t mean to be a shmuck, it’s a bad habit I’ve got, saying things to people without any regard for their feelings. I know it’s not all bad down South. Hey, I’ll make you a promise. I promise never to jump on you about the South again! Okay? Sophie, you’re the witness!” Squeezing me, tousling my hair with fingers that moved across my scalp as if they were kneading dough and like some overgrown and ludicrously affectionate schnauzer poking his noble scimitar of a nose into the coral recesses of my ear, he fell into what I began to identify as his comic mode.