Sophie's Choice (32 page)

Chapter 11

Son, the North believes it has a veritable patent on virtue," my father said, gingerly stroking with a forefinger his shiny new black eye. "But of course, the North is wrong. Do you think the slums of Harlem truly represent an advance for the Negro over a peanut patch in Southampton County? Do you think the Negro is going to remain content in that insufferable squalor? Son, someday the North is going to sadly rue these hypocritical attempts at magnanimity, these clever and transparent gestures that go by the name of tolerance. Someday--mark my word--it will be clearly demonstrated that the North is every bit as steeped in prejudice as the South, if not more so. At least in the South the prejudice is out in the open. But up here..." He paused to touch his sore eye again. "I really shudder to think of the violence and hatred building up in these slums." An almost lifelong Southern liberal, conscious of the South's injustices, my father had never been given to shifting unreasonably the various racial evils of the South onto the shoulders of the North; with some surprise, therefore, I listened to him attentively, unaware--during that summer of 1947--of just how prophetic his words were to prove. At some time long past midnight we were sitting in the dim, murmurously convivial bar of the Hotel McAlpin, where I had taken him after the disastrous altercation he had had with a cabdriver named Thomas McGuire, Hack License 8608, only an hour or so after his arrival in New York. The old man (I use the phrase merely in the paternal-vernacular sense; at age fifty-nine he looked strappingly fit and youthful) had not been badly damaged but there had been a considerable uproar and a crimson outpouring of alarming, albeit harmlessly let, blood from a superficial cut on the brow. This had necessitated a small bandage. After order had been restored, and as we sat drinking (he bourbon, I that steadfast spirit of my nonage--Rheingold) and talking, largely about the gulf which separated this devil's spawn of an urban blight north of the Chesapeake and the South's Elysian meadows (in this realm my father could scarcely have been less prophetic, not having foreseen Atlanta), I was able more than once to reflect somberly on how my old man's imbroglio with Thomas McGuire had at least allowed me momentary diversion from my newly acquired despair. For, it may be recalled, all this would necessarily have taken place only brief hours after that moment in Brooklyn when I had assumed that Sophie and Nathan had disappeared from my life forever. Certainly I was convinced--since I had no reason to think otherwise--that I would never lay eyes on her again. And so the melancholy which had taken hold of me when I left Yetta Zimmerman's and journeyed by subway to stay with my father in Manhattan had been as close to creating an excruciating physical malaise as any I had ever known--most surely since my mother's death. It was now a thing of mingled bereavement and anxiety, inextricable and bewilderingly intense. The feelings alternated. Gazing out dully at the stroboscopic dazzle-and-dark of the subway tunnel lights streaking past, I felt the combined pain like an immense and oppressive weight thrusting down directly on my shoulders, so heavy that it somehow actually compressed my lungs and made my breath come in harsh erratic gasps. I did not--or could not--weep, but I halfway knew several times that I was on the verge of getting sick. It was as if I had been privy to sudden senseless death, as if Sophie (and Nathan too, for despite the rage, the resentful chagrin and confusion he had made me suffer, he was too intricately bound up in our triadic relationship for me to suddenly abandon the love and loyalty I felt for him) had been wiped out in one of those catastrophic traffic accidents which occur in an eyewink, leaving the survivors too stunned even to curse heaven. All I knew, as the train rumbled up through the dripping catacombs beneath Eighth Avenue, was that with an instantaneousness I still could barely believe, I had been cut off from the two people in life I cared the most about, and that the primitive sensation of loss it produced was causing me anguish similar to that of being buried alive under a ton of cinders. "I admire your spunk tremendously," my father had said while we ate a late dinner at a Schrafft's. "The seventy-two hours I plan to spend in this burg is about all most mortal men from civilized parts can stand. I don't know how you do it. Your youth, I suppose, that wonderful flexibility of your age that allows you to be beguiled by, rather than devoured by, this octopus of a city. I've never been there, but really, is it possibly true that, as you wrote me, there are parts of Brooklyn that remind one of Richmond?" Despite the long train ride up from the depths of the Tidewater my father was in a splendid mood, which helped me take my mind off my spiritual disarray, at least fitfully. He mentioned that he had not been to New York since the late 1930s and that, if anything, the city appeared more Babylonian in its dissolute wealth than ever. "It's a product of the war, son," said this engineer who had helped fabricate such naval behemoths as the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise, "everything in this country has become richer and richer. It took that war to bail us out of the Depression and in the process to turn us into the most powerful nation on earth. If there's one single thing that's going to keep us ahead of the Communists for many years, it's just that: money, and we've got lots of it." (It should not be assumed from this allusion that my father was even remotely a Red-baiter. As I say, he was notably left-leaning for a Southerner: six or seven years later, at the height of the McCarthy hysteria, he furiously resigned as president-elect of the Virginia chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, to which for largely genealogical reasons he had belonged for a quarter of a century, when that mossback organization issued a manifesto in support of the Senator from Wisconsin.) Yet no matter how sophisticated they may be in matters of economics, sojourners from the South (or anywhere else in the hinterland) rarely fail to be dumfounded by New York's tariffs and prices, and my father was no exception, grumbling darkly over the dinner check for two: I think it was around four dollars--imagine!--which was hardly exorbitant by metropolitan standards in that deflated time, and even for Schrafft's profoundly ordinary fare. "For four dollars at home," he complained, "you could feast all weekend." He regained his composure quickly, though, as we strolled through the balmy night up Broadway, north through Times Square--a place which caused the old man to adopt an expression of dazed and pious speculation, although he was never a pious person and his reaction came, I think, less from real disapproval than from the shock, like a slap in the face, of the area's raunchy weirdness. It occurs to me that compared to the reptilian Sodom into which it later evolved, Times Square that summer offered scarcely more in the way of carnal corruption than some dull beige plaza in a Christly town like Omaha or Salt Lake City; nonetheless, it had its share of sleazy hustlers and garish freaks strutting through the rainbows and whirlpools of neon, even then, and it helped a little in the way of distracting me from my deep gloom to hear his whispered expletives--he could still utter "Jeru-salem!" with the rustic openness of a character out of Sherwood Anderson--and to watch his gaze, following the iridescent rayon undulations of some chichi mulatto whore, reflect in quick sequence glassy incredulity and a certain ineluctable itch. Did he ever get laid? I wondered. A widower for nine years, he surely deserved to, but like most Southerners (or Americans, for that matter) of his vintage he was reticent, even secretive, about sex, and his life in that sphere was to me a mystery. In truth, I hoped that in his mature state he had not allowed himself to be sacrificed on the altar of Onan, like his hapless offspring; or could it simply be that just now I had misinterpreted his glance and that he was mercifully free of that fever at last? At Columbus Circle we hailed a taxi and headed back to the McAlpin. I must have fallen into my despondent mood again, for I heard him say, "What's wrong, son?" I muttered something about a stomach ache--the victuals at Schrafft's--and let it go at that. As much as I felt the need to unburden myself to someone, I found it impossible to divulge anything about this recent upheaval in my life. How could I ever adequately outline the dimensions of my loss, much less go into the complexities of the situation which led up to that loss: my passion for Sophie, the wonderful comradeship with Nathan, Nathan's crazy fugue of a few hours ago, and the final, sudden, agonizing abandonment? Not being a reader of Russian novels (which that scenario seemed in certain melodramatic respects to resemble), my father would have found the story totally beyond comprehension. "You're not having too much money trouble, are you?" he inquired, adding that he well knew that the proceeds from the sale of the young slave Artiste which he had sent me weeks before could hardly be expected to last forever. Then in what I sensed was a gentle, roundabout way he began to broach the possibility of my coming South to live again. He had just barely edged up on the subject, so briefly and tentatively that I had not had time even to reply, when the taxi slid to a stop in front of the McAlpin. "I wouldn't think it would be too healthy," he was saying, "living in a place with people like the ones we just saw." 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 been 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 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 a 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