William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (209 page)

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 boss 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.

We walked in the gayest of spirits toward the subway station—Sophie between us now, her arms linked in ours—and he returned to that grits-and-molasses accent he rendered with such fantastic precision; there was no sarcasm this time, no intent to needle me, and his intonation, accurate enough to fool a native of Memphis or Mobile, caused me to nearly choke with laughter. But his gift was not mimicry alone; what emanated from him so drolly was the product of dazzling invention. With the loutish, swollen, barely comprehensible diction I had heard bubble up out of the tonsils of all sorts of down-home rustics, he embarked on an improvisation so crazily funny and so deadly precise and obscene that in my own hilarity I quite forgot that it all involved those people whom he had been flaying only moments before with unpitying and humorless rage. I’m sure Sophie missed many of the nuances of his act, but affected by the general contagion, joined me in filling Flatbush Avenue with noisy runaway laughter. And all of it, I dimly began to realize, was blessedly purgative of the mean and threatful emotions which had churned up like an evil storm in Sophie’s room.

Along a block and a half of the city’s crowded, easygoing Sunday street, he created an entire southern Appalachian scenario, a kind of darkling, concupiscent Dogpatch in which Pappy Yokum was transformed into an incestuous old farmer consecrated to romps with a daughter that Nathan—ever medically aware—had christened Pink Eye. “Ever git yore dick sucked by a harelip?” Nathan cackled, too loud, startling a pair of window-shopping Hadassah matrons, who drifted past us with expressions of agony as Nathan sailed blissfully on, doing a job on Mammy. “You done knocked up mah precious baby again!” he boohooed in female plaint, his voice a heavenly facsimile—down to the perfect shading of falsetto—of that of some weak-witted and godforsaken wife and victim, blighted by wedlock, history and retrograde genes. As impossible to reproduce as the exact quality of a passage of music, Nathan’s rollicking, dirty performance—and its power, which I can only barely suggest—had its origins in some transcendent desperation, although I was only beginning to be aware of that. What I
was
aware of, as my wild laughter sprang forth, was that it was a species of genius—and this was something I would wait another twenty years to witness, in the incandescent figuration of Lenny Bruce.

Because it was well past noon, Nathan and Sophie and I decided to postpone our “gourmet” seafood meal until the evening. To fill the gap we bought beautiful long kosher frankfurters with sauerkraut and Coca-Colas at a little stand and took them with us to the subway. On the train, which was thronged with beach-famished New Yorkers carrying huge bloated inner tubes and squalling infants, we managed to find a seat where we could loll three abreast and munch at our humble but agreeable fare. Sophie fell to eating her hot dog with truly serious absorption while Nathan unwound from his flight and began to get better acquainted with me over the clamor of the train. He was ingratiating now, inquisitive without being nosy, and I responded easily to the questions. What brought me to Brooklyn? What did I do? What did I live on? He seemed tickled and impressed to learn that I was a writer, and as for my means of support, I was about to lapse into my silkiest plantation brogue and say something on the order of “Well, you see, there was this nigger—
Knee-grow
—slave I owned, that was sold... ” But I thought this might provoke Nathan into thinking I was pulling his leg; he might then embark again upon his monologue, which was becoming a trifle exhausting, so I merely smiled thinly, wrapping myself in an enigma, and replied, “I have a private source of income.”

“You’re a writer?” he said again, earnestly and with obvious enthusiasm. Shaking his head back and forth as if with the minor marvel of it all, he leaned across Sophie’s lap and gripped my arm at the elbow. And I did not feel it at all awkward or emotional when his black, brooding eyes pierced into mine and he told me in a shout, “You know, I think we’re going to become great friends!”

“Oh, we’re
all
going to become great friends!” Sophie echoed him suddenly. A lovely phosphorescence enveloped her face as the train plunged toward sunlight, out of the claustrophobic tunnel and into the marshy maritime reaches of south Brooklyn. Her cheek was very close to my own, flushed with contentment, and when once again she linked her arms in mine and Nathan’s, I felt on cozy enough terms to remove, between my delicate thumb and forefinger, a tiny thread of sauerkraut clinging to the corner of her lip. “Oh, we’re going to be the
best
of friends!” she trilled over the train’s rackety noise, and she gave my arm a tight squeeze that was certainly not flirtatious but contained something in it more than—well, casual. Call it the reassuring squeeze of one who, secure in her love for another, wished to admit a new-found companion into the privileges of her trust and affection.

This was one hell of a compromise, I thought, pondering the harsh inequity of Nathan’s custodianship of such an exquisite prize, but better even this savory little crust than no loaf at all. I returned Sophie’s squeeze with the clumsy pressure of unrequited love, and realized as I did so that I was so horny my balls had begun to ache. Earlier, Nathan had mentioned getting me a girl at Coney Island, a “hot dish” he knew named Leslie; it was a consolation to be looked forward to, I supposed in the stoic mood of the perpetual runner-up, decorously concealing by means of a languidly arranged hand the gabardine bulge in my lap. Despite all this frustration, I began to try to convince myself, with partial success, that I was happy; certainly I was happier than I had been in as long as I could remember. Thus I was ready to bide my time and discover what might felicitously happen, see what Sundays like this—entwined amid the other promising days of the onrushing summer—would bring. I drowsed a little. I was set softly aflame by Sophie’s nearness, by her bare arm moist against mine, and by some scent she wore—an earthy, disturbing perfume vaguely herbal, like thyme. Doubtless some obscure Polish weed. Floating on an absolute tidal wave of desire, I fell into a daydream through which there rushed back sharp flickering impressions of my hapless eavesdrop of the day before. Sophie and Nathan, asprawl on the apricot bedspread. I could not get that image out of my mind. And their words, their raging lovewords showering down!