Sophie's Choice (25 page)

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 andgentlemen--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 white-knuckled 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 stood now, 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 rosé 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 way, 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." "What happened?" I said, cold with apprehension. "Where's Sophie? Where's Nathan?" "They're gone, both of them. They finally cut out for good." "What do you mean, for good?" "Just what I said," he replied. "Finished. For good. Gone for good, and fuckin' good riddance, I say. There was something creepy, I mean sick about this house with that fuckin' golem Nathan. All that fightin' and screamin'. Fuckin' good riddance, if you want to know." I felt desperation edging my voice as I demanded, "But where did they go? Did they tell you where they were going?" "No," he said, "they went in two directions." "Two directions? Do you mean..." "I seen them come back in the house about two hours ago just when I was walkin' up the street. I'd went out to a movie. Already he was howlin' at her like a gorilla. I said to myself: Oh shit, another fight already, after all these weeks when it was quiet. Now I got to maybe try to save her again from this meshuggener. But then when I get to the house here I see that he's makin' her pack up. I mean, he's in his room, see, packin' his own things, and she's in the other room packin' hers. And all the time he's hollerin' at her like a madman--oy, what dirty things he calls her!" "And Sophie..." "And she--she's cryin' her eyes out the whole time, the two of them packin' their things and him screamin' and callin' her a whore and a cunt and Sophie bawlin' like a baby. It made me sick!" He paused, took a swallow of air, then resumed more slowly. "I didn't realize that they were packin' to leave for good. Then he looked down over the railing and seen me and asked where Yetta was. I said she was over in Staten Island visitin' her sister. He threw me down thirty dollars for the rent, Sophie's and his. Then I realized they were gettin' out for good." "When did they finally go?" I asked. A sense of loss that was as suffocatingly painful as actual bereavement welled up in me; I gagged on a wet heave of nausea. "Didn't they leave an address?" "I tell you they went in two different directions," he said impatiently. "They get their stuff all packed finally and go downstairs. This was only about twenty minutes ago. Nathan gives me a buck to help bring the baggage down, also to take care of the phonograph. Says he'll come back and get it later, along with some boxes. Then when the baggage is all out on the sidewalk he gets me to go up to the corner and flag down a couple of taxis. When I come back with the taxis he's still hollerin' at her, and I say to myself: Well, at least this time he didn't hit her or nothin'. But he's still hollerin' at her, about Owswitch mainly. Something like Owswitch." "About... what?" "About Owswitch, that's what he says. Called her a cunt again and asked her this weirdo question over and over. Asked her how come she lived through Owswitch. What did he mean by that?" "Called her..." I faltered helplessly, nearly bereft of speech. "Then what..." "Then he gave her fifty bucks--it looked like about that--and told the driver to take her someplace in New York, Manhattan, some hotel I think, I can't remember where. He said somethin' about how happyhe'd be never to have to see her again. I've never heard anyone cry like that Sophie was cryin' then. Anyway, after she was gone he put his own things in the other cab and left in the opposite direction, up toward Flatbush Avenue. I think he must of went to his brother's in Queens." "Gone then," I whispered, evilly stricken now. "Gone for good," he replied, "and good fuckin' riddance I say. That guy was a golem! But Sophie--Sophie I feel
sorry for. Sophie was a real nice broad, you know?" For a moment I could say nothing. The gentle Haydn, murmurous with longing, filled the abandoned room nearby with its sweet, symmetrical, pensive cadences, adding to my feeling of some absolute void, and of irretrievable loss. "Yes," I said finally, "I know." "What's Owswitch?" said Morris Fink.