William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (225 page)

Strangely perhaps, I was not totally mystified by Jews themselves. Within the outer layers of civil life in that busy Southern town Jews were warmly, thoroughly assimilated and became unexceptional participants: merchants, doctors, lawyers, a spectrum of bourgeois achievement. The deputy (“vice-”) mayor was a Jew; the large local high school took exemplary pride in its winning teams and that
rara avis,
a hotshot triple-threat Jewish athletic coach. But I saw how Jews seemed to acquire another self or being. It was out of the glare of daylight and the bustle of business, when Jews disappeared into their domestic quarantine and the seclusion of their sinister and Asiatic worship—with its cloudy suspicion of incense and rams’ horns and sacrificial offerings, tambourines and veiled women, lugubrious anthems and keening banshee wails in a dead language—that the trouble began for an eleven-year-old Presbyterian.

I was too young, I suppose, and too ignorant to make the connection between Judaism and Christianity. Likewise, I could not be aware of the grotesque but now obvious paradox: that after Sunday School, as I stood blinking at the somber and ominous tabernacle across the street (my little brain groggy with a stupefyingly boring episode from the Book of Leviticus that had been force-fed me by a maidenly male bank teller named McGehee, whose own ancestors at the time of Moses were worshipping trees on the Isle of Skye and howling at the moon), I had just absorbed a chapter of the ancient, imperishable, ever-unfolding history of the very people whose house of prayer I was gazing upon with deep suspicion, along with a shivery hint of indefinable dread. Dolefully I thought of Abraham and Isaac. God, what unspeakable things went on in that heathen sanctum! On Saturdays, too, when good Gentiles were mowing their lawns or shopping at Sol Nachman’s department store. As a junior Bible scholar, I knew both a great deal about the Hebrews and too little, therefore I still could not truly picture what transpired at the Congregation Rodef Sholem. My childish fancy suggested that they blew a shofar, whose rude untamed notes echoed through a place of abiding gloom where there was a rotting old Ark and a pile of scrolls. Bent kosher women, faces covered, wore hair shirts and loudly sobbed. No stirring hymns were sung, only monotonous chants in which there was repeated with harsh insistency a word sounding like “adenoids.” Spectral and bony phylacteries flapped through the murk like prehistoric birds, and everywhere were the rabbis in skullcaps moaning in a guttural tongue as they went about their savage rites—circumcising goats, burning oxen, disemboweling newborn lambs. What else could a little boy think, after Leviticus? I could not understand how my adored Miriam Bookbinder, or Julie Conn, the volatile high school athletic coach whom everyone idolized, could survive such a Sabbath environment.

Now a decade later I was more or less free of such delusions, but not so completely free that I was not a little apprehensive about what I might find
chez
Lapidus in my first encounter with a Jewish home. Just before I got off the train at Brooklyn Heights, I found myself speculating on the physical attributes of the place I was about to visit, and—as with the synagogue—made associations with gloom and darkness. This was not the eccentric fantasia of my childhood. I was scarcely anticipating anything so bleak as the slatternly railroad flats I had read about in certain stories of Jewish city life in the twenties and thirties; I knew that the Lapidus family must be light-years away from the slums as well as from the
shtetl.
Nonetheless, such is the enduring power of prejudice and preconception that I idly foresaw an abode—as I say—of dim, even funereal oppressiveness. I saw shadowy rooms paneled in dark walnut and furnished with cumbersome pieces in mission oak; on one table would be the menorah, its candles in orderly array but unlit, while nearby on another table would be the Torah, or perhaps the Talmud, opened to a page which had just undergone pious scrutiny by the elder Lapidus. Although scrupulously clean, the dwelling would be musty and unventilated, allowing the odor of frying gefilte fish to waft from the kitchen, where a quick glimpse might reveal a kerchiefed old lady—Leslie’s grandmother—who would grin toothlessly over her skillet but say nothing, speaking no English. In the living room much of the furniture would be in chrome, resembling that of a nursing home. I expected some difficulty conversing with Leslie’s parents—the mother pathetically overweight in the manner of Jewish mothers, bashful, diffident, mostly silent; the father more outgoing and pleasant but able to chat only of his trade—molded plastics—in a voice heavily inflected with the palatal gulps of his mother tongue. We would sip Manischewitz and nibble on halvah, while my becloyed taste buds would desperately yearn for a bottle of Schlitz. Abruptly then, my primary and nagging concern—
where,
in what precise room, upon what bed or divan in these constrained and puritanical surroundings would Leslie and I fulfill our glorious compact?—was cut off from mind as the train rumbled into the Clark Street–Brooklyn Heights station.

I don’t want to overdo my first reactions to the Lapidus house, and what it presented in contrast to this preconclusion. But the fact is (and after these many years the image is as brilliant as a mint copper penny) the home in which Leslie lived was so stunningly swank that I walked past it several times. I could not conceive that the place on Pierrepont Street actually corresponded to the number that she had given me. When I finally identified it with certainty I halted in almost total admiration. A gracefully restored Greek Revival brownstone, the house was set back slightly from the street against a little green lawn through which ran the crescent of a gravel driveway. On the driveway there now rested a spanking clean and polished Cadillac sedan of a deep winy maroon, flawlessly tended; it could have been standing in a showroom.

I paused there on the sidewalk of the tree-lined and civilized thoroughfare, drinking in this truly inspired elegance. In the early-evening shadows lights glowed softly within the house, radiating a harmony that reminded me suddenly of some of the stately dwellings lining Monument Avenue down in Richmond. Then in a vulgar dip of my mind, I thought the scene could have been a glossy magazine advertisement for Fisher Bodies, Scotch whiskey, diamonds, or anything suggesting exquisite and overpriced refinement. But I was chiefly reminded of that stylish and still-beautiful capital of the Confederacy—a cockeyed Southern association perhaps, but one that was underscored in quick succession by the half-crouched cast-iron nigger jockey that grinned pink-mouthed up at me as I approached the portico, and then by the sassy little trick of a maid who let me in. Shiny black, uniformed in ruffles and flounces, she spoke in an accent which my ear—unerringly cued—was able to identify as being native to the region between the Roanoke River and Currituck County in the upper eastern quadrant of North Carolina, just south of the Virginia line. She verified this, when I inquired, by saying that she was indeed from the hamlet of South Mills—“smack dab,” as she put it, in the middle of the Dismal Swamp. Giggling at my acumen, she rolled her eyes and said, “Git on!” Then with an effort at decorum she pursed her lips and murmured in a slightly Yankeefied voice, “Miss Law-peedus will be with you direckly.” Anticipating expensive foreign beer, I found myself already slightly intoxicated. Next, Minnie (for this, I learned later, was her name) led me into a huge oyster-white living room strewn with voluptuous sofas, portly ottomans and almost sinfully restful-looking chairs. These were ranged about upon deep wall-to-wall carpeting, also white, without a spot or stain. Bookcases everywhere were filled with books—genuine books, new and old, many with a slightly nicked look of having been read. I settled myself deep into a cream-colored buckskin chair planted halfway between an ethereal Bonnard and a Degas study of musicians at rehearsal. The Degas was instantly familiar, but from where precisely I could not tell—until all of a sudden I recalled it from the philatelic period of my late childhood, reproduced on a postage stamp of the Republic of France.
Jesus Christ Almighty
was all I could think.

I had of course been all day in a state of erotic semi-arousal. At the same time I was totally unprepared for such affluence, the likes of which my provincial eyes had glimpsed in the pages of
The New Yorker
and in movies but never actually beheld. This cultural shock—a sudden fusion of the libido with a heady apprehension of filthy but thoughtfully spent lucre—caused me a troubling mixture of sensations as I sat there: accelerated pulse, marked increase in my hectic flush, sudden salivation and, finally, a spontaneous and exorbitant stiffening against my Hanes Jockey shorts which was to last all evening in whatever position I found myself—seated, standing up, or even walking slightly hobbled among the crowded diners at Gage & Tollner’s, the restaurant where I took Leslie somewhat later for dinner. My stallionoid condition was of course a phenomenon related to my extreme youth, seldom to reappear (and never at such length after
aet.
thirty). I had experienced this priapism several times before, but scarcely so intensely and certainly never in circumstances not exclusively sexual. (Most notably there had been the occasion when I was about sixteen, at a school dance, when one of those artful little coquettes I have mentioned—of which Leslie was such a cherished antithesis—took me over all possible fraudulent jumps: breathing on my neck, tickling my sweaty palm with her fingertip, and insinuating her satin groin against my own with such resolute albeit counterfeit wantonness that only an almost saintly will power, after hours of this, forced me to break apart from the loathsome little vampire and make my swollen way into the night.) But at the Lapidus house no such bodily aggravation was needed. There was simply combined with the thought of Leslie’s imminent appearance a stirring awareness—I confess without shame—of this plentitude of money. I would also be dishonest if I did not admit that to the sweet prospect of copulation there was added the fleeting image of matrimony, should it turn out that way.

I was shortly to learn in a casual manner—from Leslie and from a middle-aged friend of the Lapiduses, a Mr. Ben Field, who arrived with his wife that evening practically on my heels—that the Lapidus fortune derived primarily from a single piece of plastic no bigger than the forefinger of a child or an adult’s vermiform appendix, which as a matter of fact it rather resembled. Bernard Lapidus, according to Mr. Field as he fondled his Chivas Regal, had prospered through the Depression years of the thirties manufacturing embossed plastic ashtrays. The ashtrays (Leslie later elaborated) were of the type everyone was familiar with: usually black, circular, and stamped with such inscriptions as
STORK CLUB,
“21,”
EL MOROCCO
or, in more plebeian settings,
BETTY’S PLACE
and
JOE’S BAR
. Many people stole these ashtrays, so there was a never-ending demand. During those years Mr. Lapidus had produced the ashtrays by the hundreds of thousands, his operation from a smallish factory in Long Island City allowing him to live very comfortably with his family in Crown Heights, then one of the tonier sections of Flatbush. It was the recent war which had brought about this transition from mere prosperity to luxury, to the refurbished brownstone on Pierrepont Street and the Bonnard and the Degas (and a Pissarro landscape I was to see soon, a view of a lost country lane in the nineteenth century wilds outside of Paris so meltingly serene and lovely that it brought a lump to my throat).

Just before Pearl Harbor—Mr. Field went on in his quiet instructive tone—the Federal government opened bidding among fabricators of molded plastic for the manufacture of this dinky object, a bare two inches long, irregular in outline and containing at one end a squiggly bulge which had to fit into a similarly shaped aperture with absolute precision. It cost only a fraction of a penny to make, but since the contract—which Mr. Lapidus won—called for its production by the tens of millions, the midget device gave birth to a Golconda: it was an essential component of the fuse of every seventy-five-millimeter artillery shell fired by the Army and Marine Corps during the entire Second World War. In the palatial bathroom which I later had need to visit, there was a replica of this little piece of polymer resin (for of such, Mr. Field told me, it was made) framed behind glass and hanging on a wall, and I bemusedly gazed at it for long moments, thinking of the unnumbered legions of Japs and Krauts that had been blasted into the sweet by-and-by by grace of its existence, fashioned out of black inchoate gunk in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The replica was in eighteen-carat gold, and its presence struck the only note of bad taste in the house. But this might be excused, that year, with the fresh smell of victory still in the American air. Leslie later referred to it as “the Worm,” asking me in addition if it didn’t remind me of “some fat species of spermatozoa”—an arresting but chillingly contradictory image, considering the Worm’s ultimate function. We talked philosophically at some length about this, but in the end, and in the most inoffensive manner, she maintained a breezy attitude toward the source of the family wealth, observing with a sort of resigned amusement that “the Worm certainly bought some fantastic French Impressionists.”

Leslie finally appeared, flushed and beautiful in a bituminous black jersey dress which clung and rippled over her various undulant roundnesses in the most achingly attractive way. She gave me a moist peck on my cheek, exuding a scent of some innocent toilet water that made her smell as fresh as a daffodil, and for some reason twice as exciting as the cock teasers I had known in the Tidewater, those preposterous virgins drenched in their odalisques’ reeking musk. This was
class,
I thought, real Jewish class. A girl who felt secure enough to wear Yardley’s really knew what sex was about. Soon afterward we were joined by Leslie’s parents, a sleek, suntanned and engagingly foxy-looking man in his early fifties and a lovely amber-haired woman so youthful in appearance that she might easily have passed for Leslie’s older sister. Because of her looks alone I could scarcely believe it when Leslie later told me that her mother was a graduate of Barnard, Class of 1922.