Sophie's Choice (19 page)

In the summer they splashed in the paddling pool in the garden, or in the Sola River. But their greatest joy was when Daddy bathed with them. He had, however, so little time for these childish pleasures...." It was into this enchanted bower that Sophie was to stray during the early fall of 1943, at a time when by night the billowing flames from the Birkenau crematoriums blazed so intensely that the regional German military command, situated one hundred kilometers away near Cracow, grew apprehensive lest the fires attract enemy air forays, and when by day a bluish veil of burning human flesh beclouded the golden autumnal sunlight, sifting out over garden and paddling pool and orchard and stable and hedgerow its sickish sweet, inescapably pervasive charnel-house mist. I do not recall Sophie's telling me about ever being the recipient of a present from Frau Höss, but it confirms one's belief in the basic truthfulness of Höss's account to know that during Sophie's brief stay under the Commandant's roof she, like the other prisoners, just as he claimed, was never in any way or at any time badly treated. Although even this in the end, as it turned out, was not so much really to be thankful for.

Chapter 7

So maybe you can see, Stingo," Sophie told me that first day in the park, "how Nathan saved my life. It was fantastic! Here I was, very ill, fainting, falling down, and along comes--how do you call him?--Prince Charming, and he save my life. And it was so easy, you see, like magic, as if he had a magic wand and he wave it over me, and very soon I am all well." "How long did it take?" I said. "Between the time..." "You mean after that day when he found me? Oh, hardly any time at all, really. Two weeks, three weeks, something like that. Allez! Go away!" She skipped a small stone at the largest and most aggressive swan invading our picnic ground on the lake. "Go away! I hate that one, don't you? Un vrai gonif. Come here, Tadeusz." She made little clucking sounds at her disheveled favorite, enticing him with the remnants of a bagel. Hesitantly, the outcast waddled forward with blowzy feathers and a forlorn lopsided glance, pecking at the crumbs as she spoke. I listened intently even though I had other concerns in the offing. Perhaps because my coming assignation with the divine Lapidus had caused me to oscillate between rapture and apprehension, I tried to quell both emotions by drinking several cans of beer--thus violating my self-imposed rule about alcohol during daylight or working hours. But I needed something to stifle my monumental anticipation and to slow my galloping pulse. I consulted my wristwatch, to discover with sickening suspense that only six hours must pass before I would be tapping at Leslie's door. Clouds like creamy blobs, iridescent Disneyesque confections, moved serenely toward the ocean, sending dappled patterns of light and shade across our grassy little promontory where Sophie talked about Nathan, and I listened, and the turmoil of traffic on the distant Brooklyn avenues drummed with an intermittent booming sound, very faint, like some harmless, ceremonial cannonade. "Nathan's brother's name is Larry," she continued. "He's a wonderful person and Nathan adores him. Nathan took me to see Larry the next day, at his office in Forest Hills. He gave me a long examination and all during the examination I remember he keep saying, 'I think Nathan must be right about you--it's just remarkable, this natural instinct he has about medicine.' But Larry wasn't sure. He thought Nathan must be right about this deficiency I had. I was so terribly pale then. He thought it couldn't be anything else after I told him all my symptoms. But naturally, he must be sure. So he got me an appointment with a friend of his, a spécialiste at the Columbia hospital, the Presbyterian hospital. This is a doctor of deficiency--no--" "A doctor specializing in dietary deficiencies," I said, hazarding a reasonable guess. "Yes, exactly. This is a doctor named Warren Hatfield, who study medicine with Larry before the war. Anyway, that same day we ride together, Nathan and I, to New York to see Dr. Hatfield. Nathan borrowed Larry's car and crossed me over the bridge to the Columbia hospital. Oh, Stingo, I remember that so well, that ride with Nathan to the hospital. Larry's car is a décapotable--you know, a convertible--and all my life ever since I was growing up in Poland, I wanted to ride in a convertible, like the ones I had seen in pictures and in the movies. Such a silly ambition, yes, to ride in an open car, but here I was on this beautiful summer day riding with Nathan and the sun coming down and the wind blowing through my hair. It was so strange. I was still sick, you see, but I feel good! I mean I knew somehow I was going to be made well. And all because of Nathan. "It was early in the afternoon, I remember. I had never been to Manhattan except by the subway train at night, and now from the car for the first time I see the river by daytime and the incredible skyscrapers of the city and the airplanes in the clear sky. It was so majestic and so beautiful and exciting, I was near to crying. And I would look at Nathan from the corner of my eye while he talked very fast about Larry and all of these marvelous things he done as a doctor. And then he would talk about medicine, and about how he would now wager anything on earth that he was right about my condition, and how it could be cured, and et cetera. And I don't know how to describe this feeling I had, looking at Nathan as we drove up Broadway. I suppose you would call it--what?--awe, there's a fine English word. Awe that this sweet gentle friendly man would come along and just be so caring and serious to make me well. He was my savior, Stingo, just that, and I never had a savior before... "And of course he was right, you see. At Columbia, at the hospital, I stay for three days while Dr. Hatfield makes the tests, and they show that Nathan is right. I am profoundly lacking iron. Oh, I am lacking some other things too, but they are not so important. It is mainly iron. And while I am there for those three days in the hospital Nathan comes to visit me every day." "How did you feel about all this?" I asked. "About what?" "Well, I don't mean to pry," I went on, "but you've been describing one of the wildest, nicest whirlwind encounters I've ever heard of. After all, at that point you're still pretty much strangers. You don't really know Nathan, don't know what motivates him, other than that he's obviously very much attracted to you, to say the least." I paused, then said slowly, "Again, Sophie, stop me if I'm getting a little too personal, but I've always wondered what happens in a woman's mind when a terrific, forceful, attractive guy like this comes along and--well, to use that expression again, sweeps you off your feet." She was silent for a moment, her face pensive and lovely. Then she said, "In truth, I was very confused. It had been so long--oh, so very long--since I had any, how shall I say"--she paused again, mildly at a loss for words--"any connection with a man, any man, you know what I mean. I had not cared about it this much, it was a part of my life that was not terribly important, since I was putting so much of the rest of my life together. My health, for the principal thing. At that moment I only knew that Nathan was saving my life, and I did not think much of what would happen later. Oh, I suppose I think from time to time how I am in Nathan's debt for all this, but you know--and it is funny now, Stingo--all of this had to do with money. That was the part that most confused me. The money. At night in the hospital I would lie there and stay awake and think over and over again: Look, I am in a private room. And Dr. Hatfield must cost hundreds of dollars. How will I ever pay for this? I had terrible fantasies. The worse one was about going to Dr. Blackstock for a loan and he asking me why, and me having to explain that it was to pay for this treatment, and Dr. Blackstock getting angry with me for becoming cured by a medical doctor. I don't know why, I have this great fondness for Dr. Blackstock that Nathan don't understood. Anyway, I did not want to hurt him, and I had such bad dreams over the money part... "Well, there is no need to disguise anything. In the end Nathan pay for it all--someone have to--but by the time he pay for it, there was nothing for me to be embarrassed about really, or ashamed. We were in love, that is to make a long story short, and it wasn't that much to pay anyway, since of course Larry would take nothing, then also Dr. Hatfield asked nothing. We were in love and I was getting healthy taking these many iron pills, which was all I needed for making me to bloom like a rose." She halted and a cheerful little giggle escaped her lips. "Stinking infinitive!" she blurted affectionately, mocking Nathan's tutorial manner. "Not to bloom, just bloom!" "It's really incredible," I said, "the way he took you in hand. Nathan should have been a doctor." "He wanted to be," she murmured after a brief silence, "he so very much wanted to be a doctor." She paused, and the light-heartedness of just a moment before faded into melancholy. "But that's another story," she added, and a wan, strained expression flickered across her face. I sensed an immediate change of mood, as if her happy reminiscence of their first days together had (perhaps by my comment) become adumbrated by the consciousness of something else--something troubling, hurtful, sinister. And at that very instant, with the dramatic convenience which the incipient novelist in me rather appreciated, her suddenly transformed face seemed almost drowned in the blackest shadow, cast there by one of those fat, oddly tinted clouds that briefly obscured the sun and touched us with an autumnal chill. She gave a quick convulsive shiver and rose, then stood with her back to me, clutching at her bare elbows with fierce hunched intensity, as if the gentle little breeze had pierced to her bones. I could not help--by her dark look and by this gesture--being reminded again of the tormented situation in which I had ambushed them only five nights before, and of how much still remained to be understood about this excruciating connection. There were so many imponderable glints and gleams. Morris Fink, for example. What about that gruesome little puppet show which he had witnessed and described to me--that atrocity which he viewed: Nathan hitting her while she lay on the floor? How did that fit in? How did that square with the fact that on each of these succeeding days when I had seen Sophie and Nathan together the word "enraptured" would have seemed to be a vapid understatement for the nature of their relationship? And how could this man whose tenderness and loving-kindness Sophie recollected with such emotion that from time to time, when speaking to me, her eyes had brimmed with tears--how could this saintly and compassionate fellow have become the living terror I had beheld on Yetta's doorstep only a short time ago? I preferred not to dwell upon the matter, which was just as well, for the polychrome cloud went on its way eastward, allowing light to flood around us once again; Sophie smiled, as if the sun's rays had dispersed her moment of gloom, and hurling a final crust at Tadeusz, said that we should be getting back to Yetta's. Nathan, she declared with a touch of excitement, had bought a fabulous bottle of Burgundy for their evening dinner, she had to shop at the A & P on Church Avenue for a fine steak to go with it; that done, she added, she would curl up all afternoon and continue her monumental wrestle with "The Bear." "I would like to meet this Mr. Weel-yam Faulkner," she said as we strolled back toward the house, "and tell him that he make it very difficult for Polish people when he don't know how to end a sentence. But oh, Stingo, how that man can write! I feel I'm in Mississippi. Stingo, will you take Nathan and me to the South sometime?" Sophie's lively presence receded, then disappeared, from mind as I entered my room and once again with heart-stopping distress was smitten by one of those sledgehammer thoughts about Leslie Lapidus. I had been foolish enough to think that on this afternoon, as the fleeting hours ticked away before our rendezvous, my customary discipline and detachment would allow me to continue my usual routine, which is to say, write letters to friends down South or scribble in my notebook or simply loll on my bed and read. I was deep into Crime and Punishment, and although my ambitions as a writer had been laid low by the book's stupefying range and complexity, I had, for several afternoons now, been forging ahead with admiring wonder, much of my amazement having to do simply with Raskolnikov, whose bedeviled and seedy career in St. Petersburg seemed (except for a murder) so closely analogous to mine in Brooklyn. Its effect on me had indeed been so powerful that I had actually speculated--not idly either, but with a moment's seriousness, which rather scared me--on the physical and spiritual consequences to myself were I, too, to indulge in a little homicide tinged with metaphysics, plunge a knife, say, into the breast of some innocent old woman like Yetta Zimmerman. The burning vision of the book both repelled me and pulled me back, yet each afternoon its attraction had won out irresistibly. It is all the greater tribute, then, to the way in which Leslie Lapidus had taken possession of my intellect, my very will, that this afternoon the book went unread. Nor did I write letters or indite in my notebook any of those gnomic lines--ranging from the mordant to the apocalyptic and aping in style the worst of both Cyril Connolly and André Gide--by which I strove to maintain a subsidiary career as diarist. (I long ago destroyed a great deal of these leakages from my youthful psyche, saving only a hundred pages or so with nostalgic value, including the stuff on Leslie and a nine-hundred-word treatise--surprisingly witty for a journal so freighted otherwise with angst and deep thoughts--on the relative merits, apparent friction co-efficients, fragrance and so forth of the various lubricants I had used while practicing the Secret Vice, my hands-down winner being Ivory Flakes well-emulsified in water at body temperature.) No, against all dictates of conscience and the Calvinist work ethic, and despite the fact that I was far from tired, I lay flat on my back in bed, immobilized like one near prostration, bemused in the realization that the fever which I had run for these recent days had caused my muscles to twitch, and that one could actually be taken ill, perhaps seriously so, with venereal ecstasy. I was a recumbent six-foot-long erogenous zone. Each time I thought of Leslie, naked and squirming in my arms as she would be in the coming hours, my heart gave that savage lunge which, as I have said, might be perilous in an older man. While I lay there in my room's peppermint-candy glow and the afternoon minutes crept by, my sickness joined company with a kind of half-demented disbelief. Remember, my chastity was all but intact. This enhanced my sense of dwelling in a dream. I was not merely on the verge of getting laid; I was embarking on a voyage to Arcady, to Beulah Land, to the velvet black and starry regions beyond Pleiades. I recalled once more (how many times had I summoned their sound?) the pellucid indecencies Leslie had uttered, and as I did so--the viewfinder of my mind reshaping each crevice of her moist and succulent lips, the orthodontically fashioned perfection of the sparkling incisors, even a cunning fleck of foam at the edge of the orifice--it seemed the dizziest pipe dream that this very evening, sometime before the sun should fulfill its oriental circuit and rise again on Sheepshead Bay, that mouth would be--no, I could not let myself think about that slippery-sweet mouth and its impending employments. Just after six o'clock I rolled off the bed and took a shower, then shaved for the third time that day. Finally I dressed in my solitary seersucker suit, extracted a twenty-dollar bill
from my Johnson & Johnson treasury, and sallied forth from the room toward my greatest adventure. Outside in the hallway (in memory, the momentous events of my life have often been accompanied by sharply illuminated little satellite images) Yetta Zimmerman and the poor elephantine Moishe Muskatblit were embroiled in a vigorous argument. "You call yourself a godly young man, and yet you do this to me?" Yetta was half shouting in a voice filled more with severe pain than real rage. "You get robbed in the subway? Five weeks I've given you to pay me the rent--five weeks out of the generosity and goodness of my heart--and now you tell me this old wives' tale! You think I'm some kind of innocent sweet little faygeleh that I should accept this story? Hoo-ha!" The "Hoo-ha!" was majestic, conveying such contempt that I saw Moishe--fat and sweating in his black ecclesiastical get-up--actually flinch. "But it's true!" he insisted. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and his juvenile voice--a falsetto--seemed appropriate to his vast, jellylike physique. "It's true, my pocket was picked, in the Bergen Street subway station." He seemed ready to weep. "It was a colored man, a tiny little colored man. Oh, he was so fast! He was gone up the stairs before I could cry out. Oh, Mrs. Zimmerman--" The "Hoo-ha!" again would have shriveled teakwood. "I should believe such a story? I should believe such a story even from an almost rabbi? Last week you told me--last week you swore to me by all that was holy you would have forty-five dollars on Thursday afternoon. Now you give me this about a pickpocket!" Yetta's squat bulk was thrust forward in a warlike stance, but once more I felt there was more bluster in her manner than menace. "Thirty years I run this place without evicting nobody. Pride I've got in never kicking anyone out except for some weird oysvorf in 1938 I caught dressed up in girls' panties. Now, after all this, so help me God I've gotta evict an almost rabbi!" "Please!" Moishe squeaked, with an imploring look. Feeling myself an interloper, I began to squeeze by, or through, their considerable mass, and excused myself with a murmur just as I heard Yetta say, "Well, well! Wherefore art thou going, Romeo?" I realized it must have been my seersucker suit, freshly laundered and lightly starched, my plastered-down hair and, doubtless above all, my Royall Lyme shaving lotion, which, it suddenly occurred to me, I had slathered on with such abandon that I smelled like a tropical grove. I smiled, said nothing and pressed on, eager to escape both the imbroglio and Yetta's vaguely lewd attention. "I'll bet some lucky girl's gonna have her dream come true tonight!" she said with a thick chortle. I flapped an amiable hand in her direction, and with a glance at the cowed and miserable Muskatblit, plunged out into the pleasant June evening. As I hurried down the street toward the subway I could hear above his feeble peeping protests the hoarsely gravelly female voice still yakking furiously, yet dying away behind me with an undertone of patient forbearance that told me that Moishe would hardly get thrown out of the Pink Palace. Yetta, I had come to learn, was deep down a good egg, or, in the other idiom, a balbatisheh lady. However, the intense Jewishness of the little scene--like a recitatif in some Yiddish comic opera--caused me to grow a bit apprehensive about another aspect of my onrushing encounter with Leslie. Rocking north in a pleasantly vacant car of the BMT, I tried distractedly to read a copy of the Brooklyn Eagle, with its parochial concerns, gave up the effort, and as I thought of Leslie it occurred to me that I had never in my life set foot across the doorstep of a Jewish household. What would it be like? I wondered. I suddenly worried whether I was properly clothed, and had a fleeting notion that I should be wearing a hat. No, ofcourse, I assured myself, that was in a synagogue (or was it?), and there quickly flashed across my mind a vision of the homely yellow-brick temple housing the Congregation Rodef Sholem in my hometown in Virginia. Standing diagonally across the street from the Presbyterian church--equally homely in the ghastly mud-colored sandstone-and-slate motif dominating American church architecture of the thirties--where as a child and growing boy I observed my Sunday devotionals, the silent and shuttered synagogue with its frowning cast-iron portals and intaglio Star of David seemed in its intimidating quietude to represent for me all that was isolate, mysterious and even supernatural about Jews and Jewry and their smoky, cabalistic religion. 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 worhipping 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 enough 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 pre-conclusion. 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 restfullooking 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