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 charnelhouse 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 Seven
“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 kept 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 understand. 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 heartstopping 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 f
ast! He was gone up the stairs before I could cry out. Oh, Mrs. Zimmerman—”