Sophie's Choice (36 page)

by the case. Blackstock realized--or allowed himself to realize--only when it was too late that this had been going on for months, maybe years. "If only I hadn't pampered her so," he grieved to Sophie. "If only I had faced up to the fact that she was a--" he hesitated at the word--"a lush. I could have put her into psychoanalytical therapy, had her cured." His recriminations were terrible to hear. "It's my fault, all mine!" he wept. And chief among his assemblage of griefs was this: that basically aware of her awful plight, he had still permitted her to drive an automobile. Sylvia was his precious pet, and that is what he called her. My pet. He had no one else to really squander his money on, and so, instead of voicing the standard husband's complaint, he actually encouraged her frequent buying sprees to Manhattan. There with some female friend--flush, plump and idle like herself--she would sweep through Altman and Bergdorf and Bonwit and half a dozen other fancy shops and return to Queens with the back seat stacked high with boxes of ladies' merchandise, most of which languished in pristine condition in her bureau drawers or got stuffed into the recesses of her many closets, where Blackstock later found score upon score of unused gowns and dresses faintly smudged with mildew. What Blackstock did not know until the sad fact was past undoing was that after her orgy of shopping she usually got drunk with her companion of the day; she favored the lounge of the Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue where the bartender was friendly, indulgent and discreet. But her ability to cope with the Southern Comfort--which even at the Westbury remained her steady tipple--was being swiftly undermined, and the disaster when it struck was sudden, terrifying and, as I say, almost indecently bizarre. Returning to St. Albans one afternoon by way of the Triborough Bridge, she lost control of the car while driving at ferocious speed (the police said that the speedometer was frozen at eightyfive miles an hour), smashed into the rear end of a truck and spun out against the guardrail of the bridge, where the Chrysler was instantly transmuted into steel splinters and plastic shards. Sylvia's friend, a Mrs. Braunstein, died three hours later in a hospital. Sylvia herself was decapitated, which in itself was ghastly enough; it was intolerable that to Blackstock's nearly insane grief was added the knowledge that the head itself vanished, catapulted by the immense impact into the East River. (There are in the lives of all of us odd instances where one later crosses the path of someone associated with what one regarded as an abstract public event; that spring I had with a small shudder read the Daily Mirror headline RIVER SEARCH CONTINUES FOR WOMAN'S HEAD, scarcely realizing that I would soon have at least a distant connection with the victim's spouse.) Blackstock was virtually a suicide. His grief was an inundation-- Amazonian. He suspended his end of the practice indefinitely, leaving his patients to the ministrations of his assistant, Seymour Katz. He announced piteously that he might never resume practice, but retire to Miami Beach. The doctor had no near relatives, and in his wild bereavement--so deep and burningly felt that she could not help but be moved by it--Sophie found herself acting as a kind of surrogate kin, a younger sister or daughter. During the several days while the search for Sylvia's head went on, Sophie was at his side in the St. Albans house almost constantly, fetching him sedatives, brewing him tea, patiently listening to his dirge for his wife. Dozens of people moved in and out, but she was his mainstay. There was the matter of the funeral--he refused to have her buried headless; steeling herself, Sophie had to absorb much gruesome theoretical talk about this problem. (What would happen if nothing was ever found?) But mercifully the head soon showed up, washed ashore on Riker's Island. It was Sophie who took the telephone call from the city morgue, and it was she who on the urgent advice of the medical examiner managed (though with great difficulty) to persuade Blackstock to forgo a final look at the remnant. At last reassembled, Sylvia's body was laid to rest in a Hebrew cemetery on Long Island. Sophie was amazed at the vast numbers of the doctor's friends and patients who attended the funeral. Among the mourners was a personal representative from the mayor of New York, a high-ranking police inspector, and Eddie Cantor, the famous radio comedian whose spine Blackstock had treated. Riding back to Brooklyn in the mortuary limousine, Blackstock slumped against Sophie and wept hopelessly, telling her in Polish once again how much she meant to him, as if she were the daughter whom he and Sylvia never had. There was no approximation of a Jewish wake. Blackstock preferred solitude. Sophie went with him to the St. Albans house and helped him straighten out a few things. It was early evening when--over her protests that she should take the subway--he drove her to Brooklyn in his bargelike Fleetwood, depositing her at the door of the Pink Palace just as a hazy autumnal dusk fell over Prospect Park. He seemed much more composed now and had even allowed himself a mild joke or two. He had also downed one or two weak Scotches, although he was not much of a drinking man. But standing with her outside the house he broke into pieces again, and there in the shadowy twilight he embraced her convulsively, nuzzling her neck, muttering distraught words in Yiddish and giving forth the loneliest sobbing sounds she had ever heard. So involved and stricken was this embrace, so total, that Sophie did begin to wonder whether in his desolation he was not groping for something more than comfort and daughterly assurance; she felt a midriff pressure and an urgency that was almost sexual. But she thrust the idea from her mind. He was such a puritan. And if during the long time of her job with him he had never made a pass at her, it seemed unlikely that he would do so now, drowned as he was in his misery. This assumption would later prove to be correct, although she would have reason to regret that lengthy, moist and rather uncomfortable enfoldment. For by the sheerest chance Nathan had been watching from above. She was bone-tired from the ordeal of serving as handmaiden to the doctor's grief, and looked foward to an early bedtime. Another reason to go to bed early, she reflected with rising excitement, was that the next morning, a Saturday, she and Nathan had to get a fresh start for their trip to Connecticut. Sophie had looked forward to their excursion for days. Although even as a child in Poland she had heard of the blazing marvel of the New England foliage in October, Nathan had fueled her expectation, describing the landscape she was about to see in his delicious, extravagant way and telling her that this singularly American spectacle, this amok flambeau unique in all Nature, was simply an aesthetic encounter that must not be missed. He had managed once again to borrow Larry's car for the weekend, and he had reserved a room in a well-known country inn. All this alone would have been enough to whet Sophie's appetite for the adventure, but in addition, except for the funeral and a single summer afternoon at Montauk with Nathan, she had never been outside the confines of New York City. And so this fresh American experience with its hint of bucolic beguilements gave her a thrill of joy and anticipation keener than any of its kind since those childhood summers when the train chuffed out from the Cracow station toward Vienna and the Alto Adige and the swirling mists of the Dolomites. Climbing to the second floor, she began to wonder what she would wear; the weather had become brisk and she contemplated which item among their elaborate "costumery" might be appropriate for the October woodlands, then suddenly she remembered a lightweight tweed suit Nathan had bought her at Abraham & Straus only two weeks before. Just as she reached the landing she heard Brahms' Alto Rhapsody on the phonograph, Marian Anderson's flowering dark exultancy, triumph wrested from eons of despair. Perhaps it was her tiredness or the aftereffects of the funeral, but the music brought a sweet choking sensation to her throat and her eyes blurred with tears. She quickened her step and her heart stirred because she knew the music meant that Nathan was there. But when she opened the door--"I'm home, darling!" she called to him--she was surprised to find no one in the room. She had expected him. He had said he would be there from six o'clock on, but he was gone. She lay down for what she thought would be a nap, but in her exhaustion slept for a long time, although restlessly. Waking up in the dark, she saw by the alarm clock's dim green eyes that it was past ten o'clock and she was seized by grave, immediate alarm. Nathan! It was so unlike him not to be there at the appointed hour, or at least to fail to leave a note. She felt a frantic sense of desertion. She leaped up from bed and turned on the light and began aimlessly to pace the room. Her only thought was that he had come home from work, then gone out for something and had met with a terrible accident on the street. Each recollected sound of a police siren, screeching just now through her dreams, betokened certain catastrophe. Part of her mind told her that this panic was foolish, but it was something she could not help or avoid. Her love for Nathan was so totally consuming, yet at the same time was defined by such childlike dependence in a hundred ways, that the terror that surrounded her in his unexplained absence was utterly demoralizing, like being caught in that strangling fear--the fear that she might be abandoned by her parents--which she had often felt as a little girl. And she knew that this, too, was irrational but beyond remedy. Turning the radio on, she sought a news announcer's empty distraction. She continued to pace the room, visualizing the most ghastly mishaps, and she was on the verge of dissolving into tears when he suddenly and noisily burst through the door. At that instant she felt an immediate blessing like showering light--resurrection from the dead. She remembered thinking: I cannot believe such love. He smothered her in his arms. "Let's fuck," he breathed into her ear. Then he said, "No, let's wait. I've got a surprise for you." She trembled in his irresistible bear hug, as pliantly feeble with relief as the stalk of a flower. "Dinner--" she began fatuously. "Don't talk about dinner," he said loudly, releasing her. "We've got better things to do." As he moved around in a happy little jig she looked into his eyes; the flashing eccentric glitter there, together with his overflowing, overpowering voice--near-frenzy, manic--told her at once that he was high on his "stuff." Yet although she had never seen him quite this extravagantly agitated, she was not alarmed. Amused, vastly relieved, but not alarmed. She had seen him high before. "We're going to a jam session at Morty Haber's," he announced, rubbing his nose like a lovesick moose across her cheek. "Get your coat on. We're going to a jam session and celebrate!" "Celebrate what, darling?" she asked. Her love for him and her sense of salvation were at that moment so lunatic that she would have tried to swim the Atlantic with him had he commanded her to do so. Nonetheless, she was perplexed and all but engulfed by his electric fever (an intense feeling of famishment stabbed her too) and she reached out her hands in a vain, fluttering effort to quiet him down. "Celebrate what?" she said again. She couldn't restrain herself from chortling at his loud runaway enthusiasm. She kissed his schnoz. "Remember the experiment I was telling you about?" he said. "That blood-classification thing that had us stumped all last week. The problem I was telling you about having to do with serum enzymes?" Sophie nodded. She had never understood the vaguest thing about his laboratory research but had listened faithfully and remained an attentive one-woman gallery for his complex disquisitions on physiology and the chemical enigmas of the human body. Had he been a poet, he would have read her his gorgeous verse. But he was a biologist and he made her captive to macrocytes and hemoglobin electrophoresis and ion exchange resins. She understood nothing of this. But she loved it all because she loved Nathan, and now in reply to his question, which was largely rhetorical, she said, "Oh yes." "We crashed through on that this afternoon. We got the whole problem licked. I mean licked, Sophie! It was our biggest barrier by far. Now all we have to do is to run the whole experiment one more time for the Standards and Control Department--a formality, that's all--and we'll be in like a bunch of burglars. We'll have a clear road to the most important medical breakthrough in history!" "Hooray!" said Sophie. "Give me a kiss." He shmoozed and whispered around the edge of her lips with his own lips and stuck his tongue in her mouth, insinuating it there with droll titillating little forays and retreats, making movements gently copulatory. Then abruptly he drew away. "So we're going to celebrate at Morty's. Let's go!" "I'm hungry!" she exclaimed. It was not a very firm objection, but she felt compelled to say it, feeling honest stomach pangs. "We'll eat at Morty's," he replied cheerfully, "don't worry. There'll be plenty for noshing--let's go!" "A special bulletin." It arrested them both at the same instant--that radio announcer's voice with its coached and modulated rhythms. Sophie saw Nathan's face lose all mobility for a split second, as if frozen, and then she herself glimpsed in the mirror her jaw cocked awkwardly sideways in a rigid attitude of dislocation, a pained look in her eyes, as if she had broken a tooth. The announcer was saying that in the prison at Nuremberg ex-Field Marshal Hermann Göring had been discovered dead in his cell, a suicide. The means of death was apparently cyanide poisoning, accomplished orally by a capsule or pill which had been secreted somewhere on his body. Contemptuous to the last (the voice droned on), the condemned Nazi leader thus avoided retribution at the hands of his enemies in the same way as had such of his predecessors in death as Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and the master planner, Adolf Hitler... Sophie felt a shiver run through her body and saw Nathan's face unfreeze, regaining its vivacious shape just as he said with a soft gasp, "Jesus! He beat the man. He beat the man with the rope. That clever, fat son of a bitch!" He leaped at the radio, hovering over it while he played with the dial. Sophie stirred about restlessly. She had with methodical determination tried to banish from her mind practically everything to do with the past war, and she had completely ignored the Nuremberg trials, which had captured the headlines all during the year. Indeed,