Sophie's Choice - William Styron [110]
As I have already pointed out, I had been perplexed to discover during my sojourn in the North that New Yorkers often tended to regard Southerners either with extreme hostility (as Nathan had regarded me initially) or with amused condescension, as if they made up some class of minstrel entertainer. Although I knew Leslie was attracted by my “serious” side, I also fell into the latter category. I had almost overlooked the fact—until Minnie reappeared—that in Leslie’s eyes I was fresh and exotic news, a little like Rhett Butler; my Southernness was my strongest suit and I began to play it then and throughout the evening for all it was worth. The following banter, for instance (an exchange which twenty years later would have been unthinkable), caused Leslie to pat her lovely jersey-clad thighs in merriment.
“Minnie, I’m just dying for some down-home food. Real colored folks’ food. None of these ole Communist fish eggs.”
“Mmmm-huh! Me too! Ooh, how I’d love to git me a mess of salt mullet. Salt mullet and grits. Dat’s what I call eatint’!”
“How ’bout some boiled chitlins, Minnie? Chitlins and collard greens!”
“Git on!” (Wild high giggles) “You talk about chitlins, you git me so hongry I think I’ll jes die!”
Later at Gage & Tollner’s, as Leslie and I dined beneath gaslight on littleneck clams and crabmeat imperial, I came as near to experiencing a pure amalgam of sensual and spiritual felicities as I ever would in my life. We sat very close together at a corner table away from the babble of the crowd. We drank some extraordinary white wine that livened my wits and untethered my tongue as I told the true story of my grandfather on my father’s side who had lost an eye and a kneecap at Chancellorsville, and the phony story of my great-uncle on my mother’s side whose name was Mosby and who was one of the great Confederate guerrilla leaders of the Civil War. I say phony because Mosby, a Virginia colonel, was not related to me in the slightest way; the story, however, was both passably authentic and colorful and I told it with drawling embellishments and winsome sidelights and bravura touches, savoring each dramatic effect and in the end turning on such slick medium-voltage charm that Leslie, eyes ashine, reached up and grasped my hand as she had at Coney Island, and I felt her palm a little moist with desire, or so it seemed. “And then what happened?” I heard her say after I had paused for a significant effect. “Well, my great-uncle—Mosby,” I went on, “had finally surrounded that Union brigade in the Valley. It was at night and the Union commander was asleep in his tent. Mosby went into this dark tent and prodded the general in the ribs, waking him up. ‘General,’ he said, git up, I‘ve got news about Mosby!’ The general, not knowing the voice but thinking it was one of his own men, leaped up in the dark and said, ‘Mosby! Have you got him?’ And Mosby replied, ‘No, suh! He’s got you!’ ”
Leslie’s response to this was gratifying—a throaty, deeply appreciative contralto whoop which caused heads to turn at adjoining tables, along with an admonitory look from an elderly waiter. After her laughter died away, we both fell silent for a moment, gazing down into our after-dinner brandy. Then finally it was she, not I, who broached the subject which I knew had been uppermost in her mind as well as my own. “You know, it’s funny about that time,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean about the nineteenth century. I mean, one never thinks about them fucking. All those books and stories, and there’s not a word about them fucking.”
“Victorianism,” I said. “Sheer prudery.”
“I mean, I don’t know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I’ve had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you’re able to read.” She paused and squeezed my hand.