William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (232 page)

Sophie had begun to sniffle softly into a handkerchief clutched in white-knuckled fingers. “No, no, darling,” I heard her say in whispers, “it just
isn’t true.
”

Nathan’s stilted, didactic enunciation might have been, under different circumstances, vaguely comical—a burlesque of itself—but now was edged with such real threat, rage and obdurate conviction that I could not help but give a small shiver and feel at my back the approach, like the thudding of gallows-bound footsteps, of some awful and unnamed doom. I heard myself groan, clearly audible above the harangue, and it occurred to me that this dreadful assault on Sophie had weirdly identical resonances to those of the fracas in which I had first glimpsed him acting out his implacable enmity, the scenes distinguished one from the other mainly by the tone of voice—fortissimo that evening weeks ago, now singularly level and restrained but no less sinister. Abruptly I was conscious that Nathan was aware of my presence. His words were flatly uttered and edged with the faintest frost of hostility as he said to me, without looking up, “Why don’t you sit down next to the
premiere putain
of Flatbush Avenue.” I sat down but said nothing, my mouth having become parched and speechless.

As I seated myself, Nathan rose to his feet. “It seems to me that a little Chablis is in order now for furtherance of our celebration.” I gaped up at him while he spoke in this humorless, declamatory way. Suddenly I got the impression that he was exercising a severe control over himself, as if he were trying to prevent his entire big frame from flying apart or crumpling like a marionette on strings. I saw for the first time that shiny streams of sweat were coursing down his face, though our corner was ventilated by almost frigid breezes; also, there was something funny about his eyes—exactly what, at the moment, I could not tell. Some jittery and feverish nervous activity, I felt, some abnormally frantic interchange of neurons in their chaotic synapses, was taking place under each square millimeter of his skin. He was so emotionally jazzed up that he almost seemed to be electrified, as if he had strayed into a magnetic field. Yet it was all held back under tremendous composure.

“Too bad,” he said, again in tones of leaden irony, “too bad, my friends, that our celebration cannot continue in the vein of exalted homage I had intended for this evening. Homage to devoted hours in pursuit of a noble scientific goal which just this day has seen the light of triumph. Homage to days and years of a team’s selfless research terminating in victory over one of the greatest scourges to beset a suffering humanity. Too bad,” he said again, after a prolonged pause that was almost unendurable in the burden it imposed on the silently spun-out seconds, “too bad our celebration will be of a more mundane stripe. To wit, the necessary and all-too-healthy severance of my relationship with the sweet siren of Cracow—that inimitable, that incomparable, that tragically faithless daughter of joy, Poland’s gem and gift to the concupiscent chiropractors of Flatbush—Sophie Zawistowska! But wait, I must get the Chablis so we can drink a toast to that!”

Like a terrified child clutching at Daddy in the vortex of a mob, Sophie squeezed down on my fingers. We both watched Nathan stiffly shoulder his way to the bar through shoals of shirt-sleeved drinkers. I turned to look at Sophie then. Her eyes were completely out of kilter, unforgettably so in the face of Nathan’s threat. I would ever after define the word “distraught” by the raw fear I saw dwelling there. “Oh, Stingo,” she moaned, “I knew this was going to happen. I just knew he would accuse me of being unfaithful. He always does when he come into these strange
tempêtes.
Oh, Stingo, I just can’t bear it when he become like this. I just know this time he’s going to leave me.”

I tried to soothe her. “Don’t worry,” I said, “he’ll get over this thing.” I had small faith in those words.

“Oh no, Stingo, something terrible will happen, I know it! Always he get this way. First he is so excited, full of joy. Then he comes
down,
and when he comes down, it is always that I have been unfaithful and then he wants to leave me.” She squeezed again, so hard I thought that her fingernails might draw blood. “And what I said to him was
true,
” she added in a frantic hurry. “I mean about Seymour Katz. It was nothing, Stingo, nothing at all. This Dr. Katz means nothing to me, he is only someone I work for with Dr. Blackstock. And it is true what I said about him fixing the phonograph. That is all he did in the room, fix the phonograph, nothing else,
I swear to you!
”

“Sophie, I
believe
you,” I assured her, in a torture of embarrassment over the babbling vehemence with which she was trying to convince me, who was already convinced. “Just
calm down,
” I snapped at her futilely.

What happened rapidly thereafter seemed to me unimaginably senseless and horrible. And I realize how faulty were my own perceptions, how clumsily I handled the situation, with what lack of wit and with what ineffectiveness did I deal with Nathan at a moment when supreme delicacy was called for. For if I had only humored Nathan, jollied him along, I just might have watched him expend all of his rage—no matter how unreasonable and intimidating it was—and out of pure exhaustion fall into a state where I might have found him manageable, his fury smothered or at least on a tether. I might have been able to control him. But I also realize that I was at that time in many ways afflicted by a staggeringly puerile inexperience: far from my mind was any idea that Nathan—despite his manic tone of voice, the hectic oratory, the sweat, the walleyed expression, the frazzled tension, the whole portrait he presented of one whose entire nervous system down to its minutest ganglia was in the throes of a fiery convulsion—might be dangerously disturbed. I thought he was merely being a colossal prick. As I say, this was largely due to my age and a real guilelessness. Distracted, violent states in human beings having been alien to my experience—bound up as it had been less with the crazy Gothic side of a Southern upbringing than with the genteel and the well-behaved—I regarded Nathan’s outburst as a shocking failure of character, a lapse of decency, rather than the product of some aberration of mind.

This was as true now as it had been on that first night weeks ago in Yetta’s hallway when, as he stormed at Sophie and taunted me about lynchings and snarled “Cracker” in my face, I had caught a glimpse in his fathomless eyes of a wild, elusive discord that sent icewater flooding through my veins. And so as I sat there with Sophie, numb with discomfort, grieving at the appalling transformation which had overtaken this man whom I so cared for and admired, yet with indignation scraping me raw over the anguish he was forcing Sophie to endure, I resolved that I would draw the line as to how far Nathan would proceed in his harassment. He would bully Sophie no more, I decided, and he had fucking well better watch his step with me. This might have been a reasonable decision had I been dealing with a beloved friend who had simply let his temper get out of hand, but hardly (and I was not yet beginning to acquire the first flicker of wisdom to realize it) a man in whom paranoia was a sudden rampaging guest.

“Did you notice something very peculiar in his eyes?” I murmured to Sophie. “Do you think he might have taken too much of that aspirin you got for him, or something?” The innocence of such a question was, I now realize, almost inconceivable, given what was eventually to be revealed to me as the cause for those dilated pupils, the size of dimes; but then, I was learning a lot of new things in those days.

Nathan returned with the opened bottle of wine and sat down. A waiter brought glasses and set them before the three of us. I was relieved to see that the expression on Nathan’s face had softened somewhat, no longer quite the rancorous mask it had been only moments before. But the fierce strait-jacketed tension remained in the muscles of the cheek and neck and also the sweat poured forth: it stood out on his brow in droplets, matching in appearance—I noted irrelevantly—the mosaic of cool dewdrops on the bottle of Chablis. And then I caught sight for the first time of the great crescents of soaked white fabric underneath his arms. He poured wine in our glasses, and although I shrank from looking at Sophie’s face, I saw that her hand, holding the outstretched glass, was quivering. I had committed the major mistake of keeping unfolded on the table beneath my elbow the copy of the
Post,
with its page turned to the photograph of Bilbo. I saw Nathan glance at the picture and make what appeared to be a smirk full of enormous and wicked self-satisfaction.

“I read that article just a while ago on the subway,” he said, raising his glass. “I propose a toast to the slow, protracted, agonizing death of the Senator from Mississippi, Mushmouth Bilbo.”

I was silent for a moment. Nor did I raise my glass as Sophie did. She lifted hers out of nothing at this point, I was sure, but dumb reflexive obedience. Finally I said as casually as I was able, “Nathan, I want to propose a toast to
your success,
to
your
great discovery, whatever it is. To this wonderful thing you’ve been working on that Sophie’s told me about. Congratulations.” I reached forward and lightly, affectionately tapped the back of his arm. “Now let’s cut all this ugly shit”—I tried to inject a jovial, conciliatory note—“and let’s all relax while you tell us, for Christ’s sake, just tell us exactly what the hell it is we’re going to celebrate! Man, tonight we want to make all the toasts to
you!”

A disagreeable chill went through me as I felt the brusque deliberateness with which he pulled his arm away from my hand. “That will be impossible,” he said, glaring at me, “my mood of triumph has been seriously compromised if not totally deflated by treachery at the hands of someone I
used to love.
” Still unable to glance at her, I heard Sophie give a single hoarse sob. “There will be no toast this evening to victorious Hygeia.” He was holding his glass aloft, elbow propped on the table. “We will toast instead the painful demise of Senator Bilbo.”

“You
will, Nathan,” I said, “not I. I’m not going to toast
anyone’s
death—painful or not painful—and neither should you. You of all people should know better. Aren’t you in the healing business? This is not a very funny joke, you know: It’s fucking obscene to toast death.” My sudden pontifical tone was something I seemed unable to repress. I raised my own glass. “To life,” I proposed, “to your life,
ours“
—I made a gesture which included Sophie—“to
health.
To your great discovery.” I sensed a note of pleading in my voice, but Nathan remained immobile and grim-faced, refusing to drink. Stymied, feeling a spasm of desperation, I slowly lowered my glass. I also, for the first time, felt a touch of warm rage churning in the region of my abdomen; it was a slow conglomerate anger, directed in equal parts at Nathan’s hateful and dictatorial manner, his foul treatment of Sophie and (I could scarcely believe my own reflex now) his gruesome malediction against Bilbo. When he now failed to respond to my counter-toast, I set my glass down and said with a sigh, “Well, to hell with it, then.”

“To the death of Bilbo,” Nathan persisted, “to the sounds of the screams of his last agony.”

I sensed the blood flashing scarlet somewhere behind my eyes and my heart began a clumsy thumping. It was an effort to control my voice. “Nathan,” I said, “not long ago at one point I paid you a slight compliment. I said that despite your profound animosity toward the South, you at least retained a little sense of humor about it, unlike many people. Unlike the standard New York liberal jackass. But now I’m beginning to see that I was wrong. I’ve got no use for Bilbo and never did, but if you think there’s any comedy in this
ham-handed
bit about his death, you’re wrong. I refuse to toast the death of
any
man—”

“You would not toast the death of Hitler?” he put in quickly, with a mean glint in his eye.

It brought me up short.
“Of course
I would toast the death of Hitler. But that’s a fucking different matter! Bilbo’s not Hitler!” Even while I was replying to Nathan I realized with despair how we were duplicating the substance if not the same words of the enraged colloquy in which we had gotten so wildly embroiled that first afternoon in Sophie’s room. In the time since that deafening quarrel, which had so nearly become a fight, I mistakenly thought he had relinquished his murky
idee fixe
about the South. At this moment there was in his manner all the identical bottled-up surge of fury and venom which had truly scared me on that radiant Sunday, a day that for so long had seemed comfortably remote. I was scared once more, now to an even greater degree, for I had a grim augury that this time our struggle would not find sweet reconciliation in apologies, jokes and the jolly embrace of friendship. “Bilbo is not Hitler, Nathan,” I repeated. I heard my voice trembling. “Let me tell you something. For as long as I have known you—although it is admittedly not long, so I may have gotten the wrong impression—you have honestly impressed me as being one of the most sophisticated, savvy people I’ve ever known—”

“Don’t embarrass me,” he broke in. “Flattery will get you nowhere.” His voice was rasping, ugly.

“This is not flattery,” I went on, “only the truth. But what I’m getting at is this. Your hatred of the South—which often is clearly tantamount to expressing hatred, or at least dislike, for me—is
appalling
in anyone who like yourself is so knowing and judicious in so many other ways. It is downright primitive of you, Nathan, to be so
blind
about the nature of evil...”

In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin. (For a time I thought I might be a lawyer. The profession of law, and the courtrooms in which I once briefly entertained fantasies of playing out dramas like Clarence Darrow, lost only an incompetent stick when I turned to the literary trade.) “You seem to have no sense of history at all,” I went on rapidly, my voice scaling up an octave, “none at all! Could it be because you Jews, having so recently arrived here and living mostly in big Northern cities, are really
purblind,
and just have no interest in or awareness or any kind of comprehension whatever of the tragic concatenation of events that have produced the racial madness down there? You’ve read
Faulkner,
Nathan, and you still have this assy and intolerable attitude of superiority toward the place, and are unable to see how Bilbo is less a villain than a wretched offshoot of the whole benighted system?” I paused, drew a breath and said, “I pity you your blindness.” And here had I ceased and left it at that, I might have felt that I had registered a series of telling blows, but, as I say, good sense generally has deserted me in the course of such fevered arguments and my own semihysteric energy now propelled me into regions of deep asininity. “Besides,” I persisted, “you totally fail to realize what a man of real achievement Theodore Bilbo was.” Echoes of my college dissertation rattled about in my head with the filing-card rhythm of scholarly blank verse. “When he was governor, Bilbo brought Mississippi a series of important reforms,” I intoned, “including the creation of a highway commission and a board of pardons. He established the first tuberculosis sanatorium. He added manual training and farm mechanics to the curriculum of the schools. And finally he introduced a program to combat ticks...” My voice trailed off.