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By Root 12240 0

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