“Salami and Swiss cheese on pumpernickel,” I went on, “with a pickle, half sour.”
“Stop it, Stingo, you’re killing me!” she cried with a golden laugh. “Let’s go!” And off we went to the park, via Himelfarb’s Deluxe Delicatessen.
Chapter Six
IT WAS THROUGH his older brother, Larry Landau, that Nathan had been able to get Sophie such a superb new set of dentures. And although it was Nathan’s own keen if nonprofessional diagnosis which so accurately pegged the nature of Sophie’s malady very soon after their encounter at the Brooklyn College library, his brother was instrumental in helping to find a cure for that problem too. Larry, whom I was to meet later on in the summer under very strained circumstances, was a urological surgeon with a large and prosperous practice in Forest Hills. A man in his mid-thirties, Nathan’s brother possessed a brilliant record in his field, having once been engaged—as a teaching fellow at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia—in some highly original and valuable research in kidney function which had won him excited attention in professional circles at an early age. Nathan mentioned this to me once in intensely admiring tones, obviously cherishing extravagant pride in his brother. Larry had also served in the war with grand distinction. As a senior lieutenant in the Navy medical corps he had performed brave and extraordinary feats of surgical skill while undergoing kamikaze attacks aboard a doomed flattop off the Philippines; the exploit won him the Navy Cross—a citation not too often achieved by a medical officer (a Jew to boot in an anti-Semitic Navy), and one which in 1947, with its resonant and recent memories of war and glory, was something else for Nathan to gently crow over and be proud about.
Sophie told me that she didn’t learn Nathan’s name until many hours after he rescued her at the library. What she most deeply and indelibly remembered about that first day, and the days which followed, was his truly awesome tenderness. At the beginning—perhaps only because she recalled him bending over her, murmuring, “Let the doctor take care of everything”—she could not tell that those words had been spoken facetiously, and so she thought he was a doctor even later as with a kind of commanding gentleness he held her against his arm, whispering words of comfort and encouragement while they rode back to Yetta’s in a taxi. “We’ve got to get you fixed up,” she remembered him saying, in a kind of half-jocular tone which brought to her lips the first trace of a grin since she had collapsed. “You can’t run around Brooklyn fainting in libraries and scaring people half to death.”
There was something so supportive, so friendly and benign, so caring in his voice, and everything about his presence inspired such immediate trust, that when they got back to her room (hot and stifling in the slant of afternoon sunlight, where she again had a brief fainting spell and slumped against him), she had not the slightest trace of discomfiture in feeling him gently unbutton and remove her soiled dress and then with delicate but firm pressure push her slowly down to her bed, where she lay stretched out clad only in a slip. She felt much better, the nausea had vanished. But as she lay there looking up, trying to return the stranger’s quizzical sad smile, she could feel the ponderous drowsiness and lassitude persisting to her bone marrow. “Why am I so tired?” she heard herself ask him in a faint voice. “What’s wrong with me?” She still had the notion that he was a physician and regarded his silent, vaguely sorrowing gaze upon her as being diagnostic, professional, until suddenly she realized that his eyes had fixed upon the number graven on her arm. Abruptly (and this was odd, for she had long since abandoned any self-consciousness about the marking) she made a move with her hand as if to cover it up, but before she could do so he had gently grasped her wrist and had begun to monitor her pulse as he had done at the library. He said nothing for a while, and she felt perfectly safe and at ease in his calm grip, drowsing off with his words in her ear, restorative, soothing, with that blessed touch of playfulness: “The doctor thinks you need a big pill to try to bring some color to that beautiful white skin.” Again: the doctor! Peacefully then she fell into a dreamless doze, but when, only moments after, she awoke and opened her eyes, the doctor was gone.
“Oh, Stingo, I remember so well, it was such a long time since I feel this terrible panic. And it was so strange, you know! I did not even know him. I did not even know his name! I had been with him an hour, I think even less, and now he was gone and I had this panic, this deep panic and fear that he might never come back, that he was gone forever. It was like losing a person very close to you.”
Some romantic whim of mine prompted me irresistibly to ask if she had fallen that swiftly in love. Could this have been the perfect example, I inquired, of that marvelous myth known as love at first sight?
Sophie said, “No, it wasn’t exactly like that—not love then, I don’t think. But, well, it may have been close to it.” She paused. “I just don’t know. How silly in a way for such a thing to happen. How could it be possible to know a man for forty-five minutes and feel this emptiness when he is gone? Absolument fou! Don’t you think? I was crazy for him to come back.”
A moveable picnic, our lunchtime repast took place in all of the sunny and shady corners of Prospect Park. I am no longer able to remember how many picnics Sophie and I shared—certainly half a dozen, perhaps more. Nor are most of the spots where we sprawled on the grass very clear to me—the rocky crannies and glens and secluded byways where we took our greasy brown paper bags and half-pint cartons of Sealtest milk and the Oscar Williams anthology of American verse, much thumb-stained and dog-eared, whereby I attempted to continue Sophie’s schooling in poetry that plump Mr. Youngstein had inaugurated months before. One place, however, I vividly recall—a grassy peninsula, usually unpeopled at that hour on weekdays, jutting out into the lake where a sextet of large, rather pugnacious-looking swans coasted like gangsters through the reeds, interrupting their swim long enough to waddle up onto the grass and scrounge competitively, with aggressive hissings from their voiceless throats, for the crusts of our poppyseed rolls or other leftovers. One of the swans, a small male considerably less agile and scruffier than the others, had also been injured near the eye—doubtless in encounter with some savage Brooklyn biped—and was left with a walleyed appearance that reminded Sophie of her cousin Tadeusz from Lodz, who had died many years before, at thirteen, of leukemia.
I was unable to make the anthropomorphic leap and thus failed to comprehend the resemblance between a swan and any specific human being, but Sophie swore that they were dead look-alikes, began to call him Tadeusz and murmured to him in little glottal clucks and clicks of Polish as she heaved at him the debris from her bag. I rarely ever saw Sophie lose her temper, but the conduct of the other swans, bossy and preemptive, so fatly greedy, infuriated her and she yelled Polish swear words at the big bastards and favored Tadeusz by making sure that he got more than his share of the garbage. Her vehemence startled me. I did not—because I could not at the time—connect this energetic protectorship of the underdog (the underswan?) with anything that had happened in her past, but her campaign for Tadeusz was funny and immensely appealing. Even so, I have another and personal motive for sketching a picture of Sophie among the swans. I realize now, after much racking of my mind, that it was here on this little promontory later in the summer, during one long afternoon session which lasted until the sun began to sink far behind us over Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, that Sophie told me in a voice alternately desperate and hopeful but largely desperate about part of this last convulsive year with Nathan, whom she adored but whom even then (even then as she spoke to me) she had come to see as her savior, yes, but her destroyer as well...
When to her fathomless relief he returned to her room that day, half an hour later, he came to her bed and gazed down at her once more with his gentle eyes and said, “I’m going to take you to see my brother. Okay? I’ve made a few phone calls.”
She was perplexed. He sat down beside her again. “Why are you going to take me to your brother?” she asked.
“My brother??
?s a doctor,” he replied, “one of the best doctors going. He can help you.”
“But you...” she began, then halted. “I thought...”
“You thought I was a doctor,” he said. “No, I’m a biologist. How do you feel?”
“Better,” she said, “much better.” And this was true, not the least, she realized, because of his comforting presence.
He had brought with him a grocery bag, which he now opened, extracting the contents rapidly and deftly and laying them out on the large board near the end of her bed which served as a kitchen table. “Vot a mishegoss,” she heard him say. She began to giggle, for he had gone into a very low-key comedy routine, his accent all of a sudden profoundly and luxuriously Yiddish as he catalogued the bottles and cans and cardboard cartons pouring forth from the bag, his face furrowed in a perfect replica of some elderly harassed, purblind, nervously parsimonious Flatbush storekeeper. He reminded her of Danny Kaye (so many times she had seen him, one of her few movie obsessions), with this wonderfully rhythmic and absurd inventory, and she was still shaking with silent laughter when he ceased, turned toward her and held up a can with a white label, bedewed with frosty beads. “Consommé madriléne,” he said in his normal voice. “I found a grocery where they keep it on ice. I want you to eat it. Then you’ll be able to swim five miles, like Esther Williams.”
She was aware that her appetite had returned and felt an eager spasm in her empty stomach. When he poured the consommé into one of her cheap plastic bowls she raised herself up on one elbow and ate pleasurably, savoring the soup, cool and gelatinous with a tart aftertaste. Finally she said to him, “Thank you, I feel much better now.”
She sensed again such intensity in his gaze as he sat beside her, not speaking for a nearly interminable space, that despite her trust in him, she began to feel a little uneasy. Then at last he said, “I will bet anyone a hundred dollars that you have a severe deficiency anemia. Possibly folic acid or B-twelve. But most probably iron. Baby, have you been eating properly recently?”
She told him that except for the short period a few weeks before, when she had caused herself to suffer a half-voluntary rejection of food, she had for the past six months eaten more healthy and handsomely than at any time in her life. “I have these problems,” she explained. “I cannot eat much fat of animals. But all else is okay.”
“Then it’s bound to be a deficiency of iron,” Nathan said. “In what you describe you’ve been eating you’d have had more than adequate folic acid and B-twelve. All you need is a trace of both. Iron’s a great deal trickier, though. You could have fallen behind with iron and never had a chance to catch up.” He paused, perhaps aware of the apprehension in her face (for what he had been saying puzzled and troubled her), and gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s one of the easiest things in the world to treat, once you’ve got it nailed down.”
“Nail down?”
“Once you understand what the trouble is. It’s a very simple thing to cure.”
For some reason she was embarrassed to ask his name, although she was dying to know. As he sat there beside her, she stole a glimpse of his face and decided that he was exceedingly agreeable-looking—unmistakably Jewish, with fine symmetrical lines and planes in the midst of which the strong, prominent nose was an adornment, as were his luminously intelligent eyes that could switch from compassion to humor and back again so rapidly and easily and naturally. Once more his very presence made her feel better; she was suffused by a drowsy fatigue but the nausea and deep malaise were gone. Then suddenly, lying there, she had a lazy, bright inspiration. Earlier in the day, after looking at the radio schedule in the Times, she had been badly disappointed to learn that on account of her English class she would miss a performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony on the early-afternoon concert over WQXR. It was a little like her rediscovery of the Sinfonia Concertante, yet with a difference. She remembered the symphony so clearly from her past—again, those concerts in Cracow—but here in Brooklyn, because she had no phonograph and because she always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Pastoral had completely eluded her, forever tantalizingly announcing itself but remaining unheard like some gorgeous but mute bird flitting away as she pursued it through the foliage of a dark forest.
Now she realized that due to today’s misadventure she could at last hear the music; it seemed far more crucial to her existence at the moment than this medical talk, no matter how encouraging its overtones, and so she said, “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” She had scarcely spoken the words when he reached across her and switched it on just an instant before the Philadelphia Orchestra, with its murmurous strings, hesitant at first then jubilantly swelling, commenced that inebriate psalm to the flowering globe. She experienced a sensation of beauty so intense that it was as if she were dying. She shut her eyes and kept them firmly closed to the very end of the symphony, at which point she opened them again, embarrassed by the tears streaming down her cheeks but unable to do anything about them, or to say anything sensible or coherent to the Samaritan, who was still gazing down at her with grave and patient concern. Lightly he touched the back of her hand with his fingers.
“Are you crying because that music is so beautiful?” he said. “Even on that crummy little radio?”
“I don’t know why I am crying,” she replied after a long pause during which she collected her senses. “Maybe I’m just crying because I made a mistake.”
“How do you mean, mistake?” he asked.
Again she waited for a long time before saying, “Mistake about hearing the music. I thought that the last time I hear that symphony was in Cracow when I was a very young girl. Now just then when I listened I realize that I heard it once after that, in Warsaw. We was forbidden to have radios, but one night I listened to it on this forbidden radio, from London. Now I remember it is the last music I ever hear before going...” And she halted. What on earth was she saying to this stranger? What did it matter to him? She pulled a piece of Kleenex from the drawer of her table and dried her eyes. “That is not a good reply.”
“You said ‘before going... ’ ” he went on. “Before going where? Do you mean the place where they did this?” He glanced pointedly at the tattoo.
“I can’t talk about that,” she said suddenly, regretting the way she blurted the words out, which caused him to turn red and to mutter in a flustered voice, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m a terrible intruder... I’m just an ass sometimes. An ass!”
“Please don’t say that,” she put in quickly, ashamed of the way her tone had confounded him. “I didn’t mean to be so... ” She paused, in sequence groping for then finding the right word in French, Polish, German and Russian but totally at sea in English. So she said only, “I’m sorry.”
“I have a knack for poking my big schnoz into places where it has no business,” he said, as she watched the rosy flush of embarrassment recede from his face. Then abruptly he said, “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got an appointment. But listen—can I come back tonight? Don’t answer that! I’ll be back tonight.”
She couldn’t answer. Having been swept off her feet (no figure of speech but a literal truth, for that is just what he had done two hours before; carrying her crumpled in his arms from the library to the place by the curb where he had hailed the taxi), she could only nod and say yes and smile a smile which still lingered as she heard him clatter down the steps. The time after that dragged badly. She was amazed at the excitement with which she had awaited the sound of his stomping shoes when, at about seven in the evening, he returned, bringing another bulging grocery bag and two dozen of the most bewitchingly lovely long-stemmed yellow roses she had ever seen. She was up and around now, feeling almost fully recovered, but he ordered her to relax, saying, “Please, you just let Nathan take charge.” This was the moment when she first heard his name. Nathan. Nathan! Nathan, Nathan!
Never, never, she told me, would she ever forget this initial meal they had together, the sensuously concocted di
nner which he fashioned from, of all humble things, calf’s liver and leeks. “Loaded with iron,” he proclaimed, the sweat popping out on his brow as he bent over the sputtering hot plate. “There is nothing better than liver. And leeks—filled with iron! Also will improve the timbre of your voice. Did you know that the Emperor Nero had leeks served to him every day to deepen the sonority of his voice? So he could croon while he had Seneca drawn and quartered? Sit down. Quit fussing around!” he commanded. “This is my show. What you need is iron. Iron! That’s why we’re also going to have creamed spinach and a plain little salad.” She was captivated by the way in which Nathan, ever intent upon cooking, was still able to intersperse his observations on gastronomie with scientific detail, largely nutritional. “Liver with onions is of course standard, but with leeks, sweetiepie, it becomes something special. These leeks are hard to find, I got them in an Italian market. It is as plain as the nose on your pretty but incredibly pale face that you need massive infusions of iron. Therefore the spinach. There was some research not long ago which came up with the interesting discovery that the oxalic acid content of spinach tends to neutralize a lot of the calcium, which you probably need also. Too bad, but it’s still so loaded with iron that you’ll get a good jolt of it anyway. Also the lettuce...”
But if the dinner, though excellent in itself, was mainly restorative, the wine was ambrosial. In the household of her early youth, in Cracow, Sophie had grown up with wine, her father having possessed a strain of hedonism which caused him to insist (in a country as barren of vineyards as Montana) that her mother’s ample and often elegant Viennese meals be accompanied with some regularity by the fine wines of Austria and the Hungarian plains. But the war, which had swept so much else out of her life, had obliterated such a simple pleasure as wine, and since then she had not bothered to go out of her way to drink any, even if she had been tempted to within the purlieus of Flatbush, its constituency pledged to Mogen David. But she had no notion of this—this gods’ liquor! The bottle Nathan brought was of such a quality as to make Sophie want to redefine the nature of taste; ignorant of the mystique of French wine, she did not need to be told by Nathan that it was a Châateau-Margaux, or that it was a 1937—the last of the great prewar vintages—or that it cost the flabbergasting sum of fourteen dollars (roughly half her salary for a week, she noted with incredulity as she caught a glimpse of the price on the sticker), or that it might have gained in bouquet had there been time to decant it first. Nathan went on and on divertingly about such matters. But she only knew that the savor of it gave her an unparalleled sense of delight, a luscious and reckless and great-hearted warmth that spread downward to her toes, validating all quaint and ancient maxims as to the healing properties of wine. Light-headed, woozy, she heard herself say to her provider toward the end of the meal, “You know, when you live a good life like a saint and die, that must be what they make you to drink in paradise.” To which Nathan made no direct reply, appearing to be pleasantly mellow himself as he peered at her gravely and thoughtfully through the ruby dregs of his glass. “Not ‘to drink,’ ” he corrected her gently, “just ‘make you drink.’ ” Then he added, “Forgive me. I’m a confirmed and frustrated schoolmaster.”