Sophie's Choice (13 page)

Chapter 5

It must have been a couple of weeks after settling comfortably into my pink lodgings that I received another communication from my father. It was a fascinating letter in itself, although I could hardly realize then what bearing it would ultimately have upon my relationship with Sophie and Nathan and the scrambled events that took place later on in the summer. Like the last of his letters I quoted--the one about Maria Hunt--this message had to do with a death, and like the earlier one concerning Artiste, it brought me news of what might be considered something in the nature of a legacy, or a share in one. I set down most of it here: Son, ten days ago my dear friend and political & philosophical antagonist Frank Hobbs dropped dead at his office in the shipyard. It was a swift, I should say almost instantaneous cerebral thrombosis. He was only 6o, an age I have begun desperately to perceive as being virtually in life's springtide. His passing was a great shock to me and I feel the loss deeply. His politics of course were deplorable, situating him I should say about 10 miles to the right of Mussolini, but withal he was what we who originated always termed a "good ole boy" and I shall miss intensely his hulking, generous albeit bigoted presence as we drove to work. He was in many ways a tragic man, lonely, a widower, and still mourning the death of his only child, Frank Jr., who you may remember drowned while still in his twenties not long ago in a fishing accident down on Albemarle Sound. Frank Sr. left no survivors, and that fact is central to this letter and to the reason I am writing you at some length. Frank's lawyer called me up several days ago to inform me, to my enormous astonishment, that I am the chief beneficiary of his estate. Frank had little money saved and no investments, having been like myself only a high class wage-earner within or perhaps I should say astride the precarious back of the monstrous leviathan known as American business. Thus I regret I do not bring you tidings of the imminent receipt of a fat check to lighten your worries as you labor in the literary vineyard. For many years, however, Frank had been the owner and absentee landlord of a small peanut farm over in Southampton County, a place that was in the Hobbs family ever since the Civil War. It is this farm that Frank left to me, stating in his will that while I could do with it what I wished it was his earnest hope that I continue to farm the place as he had done, realizing not only the very modest profit that can be gained from 60 acres of peanuts but enjoying the pleasant and verdant countryside in which the farm is situated, along with a lovely little stream swarming with fish. He must have known how much I appreciated the place, which I visited a number of times over the years. This extraordinary and touching gesture of Frank's has, however, I'm afraid, thrown me into something of a quandary. While I should like to do anything within my power to accede to Frank's desire and not sell the place I don't know if I am any longer temperamentally suited to farming after these many years (although as a boy in N. C. I was well acquainted with the heft of a shovel and hoe), even as an absentee owner as Frank was. It still requires a great deal of work and attention and while Frank doted on it I have my own labor cut out for me here at the shipyard. In many ways of course it is an attractive proposition. There are two very able and reliable negro tenant farmers on the place, and the equipment is in reasonably good condition. The main dwelling itself is in excellent repair and would make a fine weekend retreat particularly considering its proximity to that wonderful fishing stream. Peanuts are now a coming money crop, especially since the late war opened up so many new uses for the legume. Frank, I remember, sold most of his crop to Planters in Suffolk, where it went to help satiate America's ravenous need for "Skippy" peanut butter. There are some hogs, too, which of course make the finest hams in all Christendom. Also there are a few acres planted in soybeans and cotton, both still profitable crops, and so asyou can see there are totally mercenary aspects of the situation--aside from the aesthetic and recreative--that tempt me into lending my hand to agrarian pursuits after 40-odd years' absence from the barn and the field. Certainly it would not make me rich, though I suspect I might in some small way augment an income badly depleted by the needs of your poor aunts down in N. C. But I am balked by the aforementioned serious qualms and reservations. And this brings me, Stingo, to your possible or potential role in this so far unresolved dilemma. What I am proposing is that you come down to the farm and live on it, acting as the proprietor in my absence. I can almost feel your chagrin as you read this, and see that "but I don't know a damn thing about raising peanuts" look in your eye. I am well aware how this may not seem at all suitable to you, especially since you have chosen to cast your lot as a literary man among the Yankees. But I am asking you to consider the proposition, not because I don't honor your need for independence as you sojourn in the (to me) barbaric North but out of honest solicitude for the discontent you express in your recent letters, that sense I get that you are not precisely flourishing, spiritually or (of course) financially. But for one thing your duties would be minimal since Hugo and Lewis, the two negroes who have been on the place for years with their families, have the practical matters of the place well in hand so that you would function as a kind of gentleman farmer whose main work, I'm certain, would be the writing of that novel you tell me you have embarked upon. But you would also pay no rent and I'm sure I could manage a small extra stipend for your few responsibilities. Furthermore (and I was saving this for now) I ask you to consider this final inducement, which is the proximity of the farm to the ancient habitat of "ole prophet Nat," that mysterious negro who so frightened the pants off or (if you will pardon the more accurate expletive) the s--t out of an unhappy slaveholding Virginia so many years ago. No one knows better than I of your fascination with the "ole Prophet" since I cannot forget how even as a high school boy you were busy with your maps and your charts and all the meager information you were able to assemble regarding that extraordinary figure. The Hobbs farm is only a hop, skip and a jump from the ground upon which the Prophet set forth on his terrible mission of bloodshed, and I should think that if you took up residence there you might be richly supplied with all the atmosphere and information you need for that book I'm sure you will eventually write. Please think over carefully this proposition, son. Needless to say I would not nor can I disguise the element of self-interest that prompts the offer. I am very much in need of an overseer for the farm, if I am to keep it at all. But if this is true I cannot disguise, either, the vicarious pleasure I take in thinking that you, growing to be the writer I yearned to be but could not, might have such a splendid chance to live on that land, to feel and see and smell the very earth which gave birth to that dim and prodigious black man... In a way it was all very tempting, and I could not deny it. With his letter my father had enclosed several Kodachrome snapshots of the farm; surrounded and shaded by lofty beech trees, the sprawling old mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse looked as if it needed--aside from a coat of paint--hardly anything to make it the comfortable abode of one who might slide easily into that great Southern tradition of writer-farmers. The sorghum-sweet serenity of the place (geese paddling through the weedy summer grass, a drowsy porch with a swing, old Hugo or Lewis sending a grin full of calcimine teeth and pink gums across the steering wheel of a muddy tractor) skewered me squarely for an instant on a knifeblade of nostalgia for the rural South. The temptation was both poignant and powerful, and it lasted for as long as it took me to read the letter twice more and to brood over the house and its homely lawn again, all of it seemingly suspended in a milky idyllic mist, which may, however, have been the result of the film's overexposure. But though the letter tugged at my heart and at the same time possessed, in practical terms, a compelling logic, I realized that I had to turn my father's invitation down. If the letter had arrived only a few weeks before, at the low ebb of my life after being fired from McGraw-Hill, I might have jumped at the chance. But things were now radically altered and I had happily come to terms with my environment. So I was forced to write back to my father a somewhat regretful No. And as I look back now on that promising time I realize that there were three factors responsible for my surprising newborn contentment. In no particular order of significance, these were: (1) sudden illumination about my novel, its prognosis heretofore opaque and unyielding; (2) my discovery of Sophie and Nathan; and (3) anticipation of guaranteed sexual fulfillment, for the first time in my unfulfilled life. To begin with, a word about that book I was trying to get started on. In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes--suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery. Even at that early time I knew my first work would be flavored by a certain morbidity--I had the feeling in my bones, it may possibly be called the "tragic sense"--but to be perfectly honest, I had only the vaguest notion of what I was so feverishly setting off to write about. It is truethat I possessed in my brain a most valuable component of a work of fiction: a place. The sights, sounds, smells, the lights and shades and watery deeps and shallows of my native Tidewater coast were urgently pressing me to be given physical reality on paper, and I could scarcely contain my passion--it was almost like a rage--to get them down. But of characters and story, a sensible narrative through which I might be able to thread these vivid images of my recent past, I had none. At twenty-two I felt myself to be hardly more than a skinny, six-foot-tall, one-hundred-and-fifty-pound exposed nerve with nothing very much to say. My original strategy was pathetically derivative, lacking logic and design and substituting for both an amorphous hunger to do for a small Southern city what James Joyce had done in his miraculous microcosm. For someone of my age it was not a totally worthless ambition, save for the fact that even on the more modest level of attainment I sought, there seemed no way to invent Dixieland replicas of Stephen Dedalus and the imperishable Blooms. But then--and oh, how true it is that most writers become sooner or later the exploiters of the tragedies of others--came (or went) Maria Hunt. She had died just at that moment when I most needed that wondrous psychic jolt known as inspiration. And so during the next few days after getting news of her death, as the shock wore off and I was able to adopt what might be called a professional view of her grotesque ending, I was overtaken by a fabulous sense of discovery. Again and again I pored over the newspaper clipping my father had sent, becoming warm with excitement as the awareness grew that Maria and her family might serve as the exemplary figures for the novel's cast of characters. The rather desperate wreck of a father, a chronic lush and also something of a womanizer; the mother, slightly unbalanced and a grim pietist, known throughout the upper-middle-class, country-club and high-Episcopal echelons of the city for her long-suffering tolerance of her husband's mistress, herself a social-climbing dimwit from the sticks; and the daughter finally, poor dead Maria, doomed and a victim from the outset through all the tangled misunderstandings, petty hatreds and vindictive hurts that are capable of making bourgeois family life the closest thing to hell on earth--my God, I thought, it was perfectly marvelous, a gift from the sky! And I realized to my delight that, however unwittingly, I had already put together the first part of the frame to surround this tragic landscape: my dog-eared train ride, the passage I had cherished and reread with such daft absorption, wouldnow represent the arrival in the town of our heroine's body, disinterred from the potter's field in New York and shipped in a baggage car for final burial in the city of her birth. It seemed too good to be true. Oh, what ghoulish opportunism are writers prone to! Even before I put my father's letter down for the last time, I breathed a delicious sigh and felt the next scene hatching, so palpable I could almost reach up and fondle it, like a fat golden egg in my brain. I turned to my yellow legal pads, lifted a pencil. The train would be arriving in the riverside station, a dismal quay filled with heat, commotion, dust. Awaiting the train would be the bereaved father, the importunate mistress, a hearse, an unctuous mortician, perhaps someone else... A faithful retainer, a woman. An old Negro? Scratch scratch went the virginal Venus Velvet. I remember those first weeks at Yetta's with remarkable clarity. To begin with, there was that magnificent surge of creative energy, the innocent and youthful abandon with which I was able to set down in so short a time the first fifty or sixty pages of the book. I have never written fast or easily and this was no exception, for even then I was compelled to search, however inadequately, for the right word and suffered over the rhythms and subtleties of our gorgeous but unbenevolent, unyielding tongue; nonetheless, I was seized by a strange, dauntless self-confidence and I scribbled away joyously while the characters I had begun to create seemed to acquire a life of their own and the muggy atmosphere of the Tidewater summer took on both an eye-dazzling and almost tactile reality, as if unspooling before my eyes on film, in uncanny three-dimensional color. How I now cherish the image of myself in this earlier time, hunched over the schoolmarm's desk in that radiant pink room, whispering melodiously (as I still do) the invented phrases and sentences, testing them on my lips like some obsessed versemonger, and all the while remaining supremely content in the knowledge that the fruit of this happy labor, whatever its deficiencies, would be the most awesome and important of man's imaginative endeavors--The Novel. The blessed Novel. The sacred Novel. The Almighty Novel. Oh, Stingo, how I envy you in those faraway afternoons of First Novelhood (so long before middle age and the drowsy slack tides of inanition, gloomy boredom with fiction, and the pooping-out of ego and ambition) when immortal longings impelled your every hyphen and semicolon and you had the faith of a child in the
beauty you felt you were destined to bring forth. Another thing I remember so well about that earliest period at Yetta's was the new-found ease and security I felt--this too, I'm sure, the result of my friendship with Sophie and Nathan. I had sensed a glimmering of this in Sophie's room that Sunday. While I had droned in the hive at McGraw-Hill there had been something sick, self-flagellating in my withdrawal from people into a world of fantasy and loneliness; on my own terms it was unnatural, for I am a companionable person most of the time, impelled genuinely enough toward friendship but equally smitten by the same horror of solitude that causes human beings to get married or join the Rotarians. There in Brooklyn I had come to the point where I sorely needed friends, and I had found them, thus soothing my pent-up anxieties and allowing me to work. Certainly only the most sickly and reclusive person can finish hard labor day after day without contemplating in dread the prospect of a room that is a vessel of silence, rimmed by four empty walls. After setting down my tense, distraught little funeral tableau so permeated by human desolation and bereavement, I felt I had earned the right to a few beers and the fellowship of Sophie and Nathan. Considerable time had to pass, however--at least several weeks--before I was fated to get involved with my new chums in a fever of the same emotional intensity which threatened to consume us all when I first encountered them. When this storm broke anew it was horrible--far more threatful than the squabbles and black moments I have described--and its explosive return almost totally confounded me. But this was later. Meanwhile, like a floral extension of the pink room I inhabited, a ripe peony sending forth its petals, I blossomed in creative contentment. Another point: I no longer had to worry about the boisterous noise of lovemaking from above. During the year or so that Sophie and Nathan had maintained rooms on the second floor, they had cohabited in a rather casual, flexible way, each keeping separate accommodations but sleeping together in whichever bed at the moment seemed more natural or convenient. It is perhaps a reflection on the severe morality of that period that despite Yetta's relatively tolerant attitude toward sex, Sophie and Nathan felt constrained to live technically apart--separated by a mere few yards of linoleum-covered hallway--rather than moving in together into either one of their commodious rooms, where they would no longer have to enact their formal charade of devoted companions lacking any carnal interests. But this was still a time of worshipfulwedlock and cold, marmoreal legitimacy, and besides, it was Flatbush, a place as disposed to the extremes of propriety and to neighborly snooping as the most arrested small town in the American heartland. Yetta's house would have received a bad name had it gotten around that two "unmarrieds" were living together. So the upstairs hallway was for Sophie and Nathan merely a brief umbilicus between what in effect were separate halves of a large two-room apartment. What made it now more restful and silent for me was that my two friends soon transferred both their sleeping arrangements and their deafening amatory rites to the bed in Nathan's quarters--a room not nearly so cheery as Sophie's but now, with the coming of summer, somewhat cooler, so Nathan said. Thank God, I thought, no more annotated climaxes to intrude on my work and composure. During those first weeks I managed fairly successfully to bury my infatuation for Sophie. I so carefully banked the fires of my passion for her that I am certain that neither she nor Nathan was able to detect the molten hunger I suffered every moment I was in her presence. For one thing, at that time I was laughably inexperienced and even in the spirit of sexual sport or competition I would never have made a pass at a woman who had so clearly given her heart to another. For another thing, there was the simple matter of what I construed to be Nathan's overwhelming seniority. And this was not a trivial question. In one's twenties a few years' edge counts for much more than it does later on in life; that is, that Nathan was around thirty and I was twenty-two made him substantially the "elder" in a way that those years could not have made in our forties. Also, it must be pointed out now that Sophie, too, was about Nathan's age. Given these considerations, along with the disinterested manner I affected, I am almost sure that it never crossed either Sophie's or Nathan's mind that I might be a serious contender for her affections. A friend, yes. A lover? It would have made them both laugh. It must have been because of all this that Nathan never seemed reluctant to leave me alone with Sophie, and indeed encouraged our companionship whenever he was away. He had every right to be so trusting, at least during those early weeks, since Sophie and I never did more than casually touch fingertips despite all my craving. I became very much a listener, and I'm certain that my archly chaste detachment allowed me eventually to learn as much about Sophie and her past (or more) as Nathan ever learned. "I admire your courage, kid," Nathan said to me early one morning in my room. "I really admire what you're doing, setting out to write something else about the South." "What do you mean?" I said with genuine curiosity. "What's so courageous about writing about the South?" I was pouring the two of us coffee on one of those mornings during the week after our outing to Coney Island. Defying habit, I had for several days risen just past dawn, propelled to my table by the electric urgency I have described, and had written steadily for two hours or more. I had completed one of those (for me) fantastic sprints--a thousand words or thereabouts--which was to characterize this stage of the book's creation, I felt a bit winded, and therefore Nathan's knock at my door as he passed on his way to work was a welcome distraction. He had popped in on me like this for several mornings running and I enjoyed the by-play. He was up very early these days, he had explained, leaving for his laboratory at Pfizer because of some very important bacterial cultures that needed his observation. He had attempted to describe his experiment to me in detail--it had to do with amniotic fluid and the fetus of a rabbit, including weird stuff about enzymes and ion transference--but he had given up on me with an understanding laugh when, having taken me beyond my depth, he saw my look of pain and boredom. The failure of any mental connection had been my fault, not Nathan's, for he had been precise and articulate. It was just that I possessed small wit or patience for scientific abstractions, and this was something I think I deplored in myself as much as I envied the capacious and catholic range of Nathan's mind. His ability, for example, to switch from enzymes to Quality Lit., as he did now. "I don't think it's any big deal for me to be writing about the South," I went on, "it's the place I know the best. Dem ole cotton fields at home." "I don't mean that," he replied. "It's simply that you're at the end of a tradition. You may think I'm ignorant about the South, the way I jumped you last Sunday so unmercifully and, I might add, so unpardonably about Bobby Weed. But I'm talking about something else now--writing. Southern writing as a force is going to be over within a few years. Another genre is going to have to appear to take its place. That's why I'm saying you've got a lot of guts to be writing in a worn-out tradition." I was a little irritated, although my irritation lay less in the logic and truth of what he was saying, if indeed logical or true, than in thefact that such an opinionated literary verdict should issue from a research biologist at a pharmaceutical house. It seemed none of his business. But when I uttered, mildly and with some amusement, the standard demurral of the literary aesthete, he outflanked me neatly again. "Nathan, you're a fucking expert in cells," I said, "what the hell do you know about literary genres and traditions?" "In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man. I believe that, Stingo old pal--which is maybe why I care about you and your writing." He paused and held out an expensive-looking silver lighter, with which he ignited the end of the Camel between my lips. "May I be forgiven for abetting your filthy habit, I carry this to light Bunsen burners," he said playfully, then went on, "As a matter of fact, something I've concealed from you. I wanted to be a writer myself until halfway through Harvard I realized I could never be a Dostoevsky, and so turned my piercing mind toward the seething arcana of human protoplasm." "So you were really planning to write," I said. "Not at first. Jewish mothers are very ambitious for their sons and all during my childhood I was supposed to become a great fiddle player--another Heifetz or Menuhin. But frankly, I lacked the touch, the genius, although it left me with a tremendous thing about music. Then I decided to be a writer, and there were a bunch of us at Harvard, a bunch of very dedicated book-crazy sophomores, and we were deep into the literary life for a while. A cute little kindergarten Bloomsbury in Cambridge. I wrote some poetry and a lot of lousy short stories, like all my pals. Each of us thought we were going to outdo Hemingway. But in the end I had enough good sense to realize that as a fiction writer I was better trying to emulate Louis Pasteur. It turned out that my true gifts were in science. So I switched my major from English over to biology. It was a fortunate choice, I'm damned sure of that. I can see now that all I had going for me was the fact that I was Jewish." "Jewish?" I put in. "What do you mean?" "Oh, only that I'm quite certain that Jewish writing is going to be the important force in American literature in the coming years." "Oh, it is, is it?" I said a little defensively. "How do you know? Is that why you said I had courage to write about the South?" "I didn't say Jewish writing was going to be the only force, just the important force," he replied pleasantly and evenly, "and I'm not in the slightest trying to suggest that you might not add something significant to your own tradition. It's just that historically and ethnically Jews will be coming into their own in a cultural way in this postwar wave. It's in the cards, that's all. There's one novel already that's set the pace. It's not a major book, it's a small book but with beautiful proportions and it's the work of a young writer of absolutely unquestionable brilliance." "What's the name of it?" I asked. I think my voice had a sulky note when I added, "And who's the brilliant writer?" "It's called Dangling Man," he replied, "and it's by Saul Bellow." "Well, dog my cats," I drawled and took a sip of coffee. "Have you read it?" he asked. "Certainly," I said, lying with a bald and open face. "What did you think of it?" I stifled a calculated yawn. "I thought it was pretty thin." Actually, I was very much aware of the novel, but the petty spirit which so often afflicts the unpublished writer allowed me to harbor only a grudge for what I suspected was the book's well-deserved critical approval. "It's a very urban book," I added, "very special, you know, a little too much of the smell of the streets about it." But I had to concede to myself that Nathan's words had disturbed me, as I watched him lolling so easily in the chair opposite me. Suppose, I thought, the clever son of a bitch was right and the ancient and noble literary heritage with which I had cast my lot had indeed petered out, rumbled to a feeble halt with me crushed ignominiously beneath the decrepit cartwheels? Nathan had seemed so certain and knowledgeable about other matters that in this case, too, his augury might be correct, and in a sudden weird vision--all the more demeaning because of its blatant competitiveness--I saw myself running a pale tenth in a literary track race, coughing on the dust of a pounding fast-footed horde of Bellows and Schwartzes and Levys and Mandelbaums. Nathan was smiling at me. It seemed to be a perfectly amiable smile, with not a trace of the sardonic about it, but for an instant I felt intensely about his presence what I had already felt and what I would feel again--a fleeting moment in which the attractive and compelling in him seemed in absolute equipoise with the subtly and indefinably sinister. Then, as if something formlessly damp had stolen through theroom, departing instantly, I was freed of the creepy sensation and I smiled back at him. He wore what I believe was called a Palm Beach suit, tan, smartly tailored and perceivably high-priced, and it helped make him appear not even a distant cousin of that wild apparition I had first set eyes on only days before, disheveled, in baggy slacks, raging at Sophie in the hallway. All of a sudden that fracas, his mad accusation-- Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor!--seemed as unreal to me as dialogue spoken by the leading stinker in a long-ago, half-forgotten movie. (What had he meant by those balmy words? I wondered if I would ever find out.) As the ambiguous smile lingered on his face, I was aware that this man posed riddles of personality more exasperating and mystifying than any I had ever encountered. "Well, at least you didn't tell me that the novel's dead," I said at last, just as a phrase of music, celestial and tender, flowed down very softly from the room above and forced a change of subject. "That's Sophie who put the music on," Nathan said. "I try to get her to sleep late in the morning when she doesn't have to go to work. But she says she can't. Ever since the war she says she could never learn again to sleep late." "What is that playing?" It was naggingly familiar, something from Bach I should have been able to name as from a child's first music book, but which I had unaccountably forgotten. "It's from Cantata 147, the one that in English has the title Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." "I envy you that phonograph," I said, "and those records. But they're so goddamned expensive. A Beethoven symphony would cost me a good hunk of what I used to call a week's pay." It then occurred to me that what had further bolstered the kinship I felt for Sophie and Nathan during these nascent few days of our friendship had been our common passion for music. Nathan alone was keen on jazz, but in general I mean music in the grand tradition, nothing remotely popular and very little composed after Franz Schubert, with Brahms being a notable exception. Like Sophie, like Nathan too, I was at that time of life--long before Rock or the