But for the most part her mood was funereal when she spoke of Nathan, reminiscing with a persistent use of the past tense; it was as if she were speaking of someone long ago dead and buried. And when she related the story of their “suicide pact” on that weekend in the frosty Connecticut countryside, I was saddened and astonished. Even so, I do not think that my astonishment over that mournful little incident could have been exceeded by any form of surprise when, shortly before telling me about that aborted appointment with death, she revealed still another piece of dismal news.
“You know, Stingo,” she said a little hesitantly, “you know that Nathan was always taking drugs. I didn’t know if you could see this or not. Anyway, for some reason I have not been quite honest with you. I have not been able to mention it.”
Drugs, I thought, merciful God. I really found it almost impossible to believe. The up-to-date reader of this narrative has most likely assumed such a fact about Nathan already, but certainly I had not. In 1947 I was as innocent about drugs as I was about sex. (Oh, those lamblike forties and fifties!) Our present-day drug culture had not seen, that year, even the glimmerings of dawn, and my notion of addiction (if I had ever really thought of such a thing) was connected with the idea of “dope fiends”—goggleeyed madmen in strait jackets immured in backwater asylums, slavering molesters of children, zombies stalking the back streets of Chicago, comatose Chinese in their smoky dens, and so on. There was the taint about drugs of the irredeemably depraved, almost as evil as certain images of sexual intercourse—which until I was at least thirteen I visualized as a brutish act committed in secrecy upon dyed blondes by huge drunken unshaven ex-convicts with their shoes on. As for drugs, certainly I knew nothing about the types and subtle gradations of these substances. Save for opium, I do not think that I could name a single drug, and what Sophie disclosed about Nathan produced the immediate effect on me of having heard about something criminal. (That it was criminal was incidental to my moral shock.) I told her I didn’t believe it, but she assured me it was true, and when directly after this my shock merged into curiosity and I asked her what he had used, I heard for the first time the word amphetamine. “He took this stuff called Benzedrine,” she said, “also cocaine. But huge doses. Enough sometimes to make him crazy. It was easy enough for him to get this at Pfizer, at the laboratory where he was doing his work. Although, of course, it was not legal.” So that was it, I thought in wonder, that was behind those seizures of rage, of seething violence, of paranoia. How blind I had been!
Yet she was aware now, she said, that most of the time he had his habit under control. Nathan had always been high-strung, vivacious, talkative, agitated; since throughout the first five months they were together (and they were together constantly) she rarely saw him in the act of taking “the stuff,” she made only the most belated connection between drugs and what she simply thought was his somewhat frenetic but ordinary behavior. And she went on to say that during those months of the previous year his behavior—drug-induced or not—his presence in her life, his entire being, brought her the happiest days she had ever known. She realized how helpless and adrift she had been during that time when she first came to Brooklyn and to Yetta’s rooming house; trying to hold on to her reason, trying to thrust away the past from the rim of her memory, she thought she was in control of herself (after all, had not Dr. Blackstock told her that she was the most efficient secretary-receptionist he had ever known?), but in reality she was on the verge of becoming emotionally unhelmed, no more in command of her destiny than a puppy that has been hurled floundering into a turbulent pool. “Whoever it was that finger-fucked me that day in the subway made me see that,” she said. Even though she had been momentarily restored from that trauma, she knew she was on a downward slide—hurtling fatally and rapidly down—and she could hardly bear to think what might have happened to her had not Nathan (blundering like herself into the library on that momentous day, searching for an out-of-print copy of a book of short stories by Ambrose Bierce; bless Bierce! praise Bierce!) appeared like a redemptive knight from the void and restored her to life.
Life. That is what it was. He had actually given her life. He had (helped by the good offices of his brother Larry) restored her to health, causing her bloodsucking anemia to be corrected at Columbia Presbyterian, where the gifted Dr. Hatfield found a few other nutritional defects that needed straightening out. For one thing, he discovered that even after all these months she had the residual effects of scurvy. So he prescribed huge pills. Soon the ugly little skin hemorrhages, which had plagued her all over, disappeared, but even more remarkable was the change that came over her hair. Her golden hair had always been her most reassuring physical vanity, but having passed through Hades like the rest of her body, it had grown out scruffy, dull and fatigued-looking. Dr. Hatfield’s ministrations changed all that too, and it was not very long—six weeks or so—before Nathan was purring like a hungry tomcat into its luxuriance, stroking it compulsively and insisting that she should start modeling for shampoo ads.
Indeed, supervised by Nathan, the splendid apparatus of American medicine brought Sophie as close to a state of smiling fitness as could be wrought upon a person who had suffered such dreadful damage—and this included her marvelous new teeth. Her choppers, as Nathan referred to them, replaced the temporary false teeth which had been installed by the Red Cross in Sweden, and were the handiwork of still another friend and colleague of Larry’s—one of New York’s classiest practitioners of prosthodontia. Those teeth were hard to forget. They had to be the dental equivalent of Benvenuto Cellini. They were fabulous teeth, with a kind of icy, mother-of-pearl sparkle; every time she opened her mouth really wide I was reminded of Jean Harlow in smoochy close-ups, and on one or two memorably sunny days when Sophie burst into laughter those teeth lit up an entire room like a flashbulb.
So, brought back to the land of the living, she could only treasure the wonderful time she had with Nathan all through that summer and early fall. His generosity was exhaustless, and although a greed for luxury was not a component of her nature, she liked the good life and she accepted his bounty with pleasure—as much of her pleasure deriving from the delight which pure giving plainly gave to him as from the things themselves which he gave. And he gave her and shared in everything she could possibly have wanted: record albums of beautiful music, tickets to concerts, Polish books and French books and American books, divine meals in restaurants of every ethnic description all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. As with his nose for wine, Nathan had an informed palate (a reaction, he said, to a childhood surfeit of soggy kreplach and gefilte fish) and he took obvious joy in making her acquainted with New York’s incredible and manifold banquet.
Money itself never seemed to be of any object; his job at Pfizer obviously paid well. He bought her fine clothes (including the droll and beguiling matching “costumes” I first saw them dressed in), rings, earrings, bracelets, bangles, beads. Then there were the movies. During the war she had missed them with almost the same longing as she had missed music. In Cracow before the war there had been a period when she had drenched herself in American movies—the bland innocent romances of the thirties, with stars like Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon and Gable and Lombard. She had also adored Disney, especially Mickey Mouse and Snow White. And—oh God!—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat! And so in New York’s paradise of theatres she and Nathan sometimes went on weekend binges—staring themselves red-eyed through five, six, seven films between Friday night and the last show on Sunday. Nearly everything she possessed flowed from Nathan’s munificence, including even (she said with a giggle) her diaphragm. Having her fitted for a diaphragm by one more of Larry’s associates was a final and perhaps artfully symbolic touch in Nathan’s program of restorative medicine; she had never used a diaphragm before and accepted it with a rush of liberating satisfaction, feeling that it was the ultimate token of her leave-taking from the church. But it liberated her in more than one way. “Stingo,” she said, “never di
d I think two people could fuck so much. Or love it so much either.”
The only thorn in this bower of roses, Sophie told me, was her employment. That is, the fact that she continued to work for Dr. Hyman Blackstock, who, after all, was a chiropractor. To Nathan, brother of a first-rate doctor, a young man who considered himself a dedicated scientist (and for whom the canons of medical ethics were as sacred as if he himself had taken the Hippocratic oath), the idea of her laboring in the employ of a quack was nearly intolerable. He told her point-blank that in his view it was tantamount to whoring and he implored her to quit. To be sure, for a long time he made an extended joke out of it all, concocting all sorts of gags and stories about chiropractors and their shoddy craft that caused her to laugh despite herself; the general facetiousness of his attitude allowed her to decide that his objections were not to be taken too seriously. Even so, when his complaints grew louder and his animadversions more serious and cutting, she steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of leaving her job, as uncomfortable as the whole situation seemed to make Nathan feel. It was one of the few tangents in their relationship where she felt unable to adopt a subservient point of view. And she was firm about the matter. After all, she was not married to Nathan. She had to feel a certain independence. She had to remain employed in that year when employment was devilishly difficult to come by, especially for a young woman who (as she kept pointing out to Nathan) had “no talents.” Furthermore, she felt very secure in this job where she could speak in her native tongue to the boss, and she had frankly grown quite fond of Blackstock. He was like a godfather or beloved uncle to her and she made no bones about the fact. Alas, she came to realize that it was this perfectly innocuous fondness, containing no romantic overtone whatever, that Nathan misconstrued, adding fuel to his seething animosity. It would perhaps have been faintly comic had not his misplaced jealousy contained seeds of the violent, and worse...
Earlier there was a bizarre, peripheral tragedy affecting Sophie which should be recounted here if only because of the way in which it elaborates all the foregoing. It has to do with Blackstock’s wife, Sylvia, and the fact that she was a “problem drinker”; the horrible event itself occurred about four months after Sophie and Nathan began keeping company, in the early fall...
“I knew knee-deep she was a problem drinker,” Black-stock later told Sophie in his desperate lament, “but I had no idea how great was her problem.” He confessed with wrenching guilt to a certain willful blindness: coming home night after night to St. Albans from his office he would try to ignore her slurred speech after the single cocktail, usually a Manhattan, which he served both of them, attributing her addled tongue and unsteady gait to a simple intolerance of alcohol. But even so, he knew he was fooling himself, in his desperate love for her shrinking from the truth that was revealed in graphic figuration a few days after her death. Stuffed into a closet in her private dressing room—a sanctum never penetrated by Blackstock—were over seventy empty quart bottles of Southern Comfort, which the poor woman apparently dreaded to risk disposing of, although she plainly had no trouble acquiring the powerful sweet elixir and stowing it away by the case. Blackstock realized—or allowed himself to realize—only when it was too late that this had been going on for months, maybe years. “If only I hadn’t pampered her so,” he grieved to Sophie. “If only I had faced up to the fact that she was a—” he hesitated at the word—“a lush. I could have put her into psychoanalytical therapy, had her cured.” His recriminations were terrible to hear. “It’s my fault, all mine!” he wept. And chief among his assemblage of griefs was this: that basically aware of her awful plight, he had still permitted her to drive an automobile.
Sylvia was his precious pet, and that is what he called her. My pet. He had no one else to really squander his money on, and so, instead of voicing the standard husband’s complaint, he actually encouraged her frequent buying sprees to Manhattan. There with some female friend—flush, plump and idle like herself—she would sweep through Altman and Bergdorf and Bonwit and half a dozen other fancy shops and return to Queens with the back seat stacked high with boxes of ladies’ merchandise, most of which languished in pristine condition in her bureau drawers or got stuffed into the recesses of her many closets, where Blackstock later found score upon score of unused gowns and dresses faintly smudged with mildew. What Blackstock did not know until the sad fact was past undoing was that after her orgy of shopping she usually got drunk with her companion of the day; she favored the lounge of the Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue where the bartender was friendly, indulgent and discreet But her ability to cope with the Southern Comfort—which even at the Westbury remained her steady tipple—was being swiftly undermined, and the disaster when it struck was sudden, terrifying and, as I say, almost indecently bizarre.
Returning to St. Albans one afternoon by way of the Triborough Bridge, she lost control of the car while driving at ferocious speed (the police said that the speedometer was frozen at eighty-five miles an hour), smashed into the rear end of a truck and spun out against the guardrail of the bridge, where the Chrysler was instantly transmuted into steel splinters and plastic shards. Sylvia’s friend, a Mrs. Braunstein, died three hours later in a hospital. Sylvia herself was decapitated, which in itself was ghastly enough; it was intolerable that to Blackstock’s nearly insane grief was added the knowledge that the head itself vanished, catapulted by the immense impact into the East River. (There are in the lives of all of us odd instances where one later crosses the path of someone associated with what one regarded as an abstract public event; that spring I had with a small shudder read the Daily Mirror headline RIVER SEARCH CONTINUES FOR WOMAN’S HEAD, scarcely realizing that I would soon have at least a distant connection with the victim’s spouse.)
Blackstock was virtually a suicide. His grief was an inundation—Amazonian, He suspended his end of the practice indefinitely, leaving his patients to the ministrations of his assistant, Seymour Katz. He announced piteously that he might never resume practice, but retire to Miami Beach. The doctor had no near relatives, and in his wild bereavement—so deep and burningly felt that she could not help but be moved by it—Sophie found herself acting as a kind of surrogate kin, a younger sister or daughter. During the several days while the search for Sylvia’s head went on, Sophie was at his side in the St. Albans house almost constantly, fetching him sedatives, brewing him tea, patiently listening to his dirge for his wife. Dozens of people moved in and out, but she was his mainstay. There was the matter of the funeral—he refused to have her buried headless; steeling herself, Sophie had to absorb much gruesome theoretical talk about this problem. (What would happen if nothing was ever found?) But mercifully the head soon showed up, washed ashore on Riker’s Island. It was Sophie who took the telephone call from the city morgue, and it was she who on the urgent advice of the medical examiner managed (though with great difficulty) to persuade Blackstock to forgo a final look at the remnant. At last reassembled, Sylvia’s body was laid to rest in a Hebrew cemetery on Long Island. Sophie was amazed at the vast numbers of the doctor’s friends and patients who attended the funeral. Among the mourners was a personal representative from the mayor of New York, a high-ranking police inspector, and Eddie Cantor, the famous radio comedian whose spine Blackstock had treated.
Riding back to Brooklyn in the mortuary limousine, Blackstock slumped against Sophie and wept hopelessly, telling her in Polish once again how much she meant to him, as if she were the daughter whom he and Sylvia never had. There was no approximation of a Jewish wake. Blackstock preferred solitude. Sophie went with him to the St. Albans house and helped him straighten out a few things. It was early evening when—over her protests that she should take the subway—he drove her to Brooklyn in his bargelike Fleetwood, depositing her at the door of the Pink Palace just as a hazy autumnal dusk fell over Prospect Park. He seemed much more composed now and had even allowed himself a mild joke or two. He had also downed one or two weak Scotches, although he was not much of a drinking ma
n. But standing with her outside the house he broke into pieces again, and there in the shadowy twilight he embraced her convulsively, nuzzling her neck, muttering distraught words in Yiddish and giving forth the loneliest sobbing sounds she had ever heard. So involved and stricken was this embrace, so total, that Sophie did begin to wonder whether in his desolation he was not groping for something more than comfort and daughterly assurance; she felt a midriff pressure and an urgency that was almost sexual. But she thrust the idea from her mind. He was such a puritan. And if during the long time of her job with him he had never made a pass at her, it seemed unlikely that he would do so now, drowned as he was in his misery. This assumption would later prove to be correct, although she would have reason to regret that lengthy, moist and rather uncomfortable enfoldment. For by the sheerest chance Nathan had been watching from above.