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By Root 12298 0

study of Tom Watson of Georgia and concentrating on other hagridden folk heroes like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and James K. Vardaman and “Cotton Ed” Smith and Huey Long, I demonstrated how democratic idealism and honest concern for the common man were virtues which linked all these men together, at least in their early careers, along with a concomitant and highly vocal opposition to monopoly capitalism, industrial and business fat cats and “big money.” I then extrapolated from this proposition an argument to show how these men, basically decent and even visionary to begin with, were brought down by their own fatal weakness in face of the Southern racial tragedy; for each of them in the end, to one degree or another, was forced to play upon and exploit the poor-white rednecks’ ancient fear and hatred of the Negro in order to aggrandize what had degenerated into shabby ambition and lust for power.

Although I did not deal with Bilbo at any great length, I learned from my ancillary research (and rather to my surprise, given the truly despicable public image he projected in the 1940s) that he, too, fitted into this classically paradoxical mold; Bilbo in much the same way as the others had commenced with enlightened principles, and indeed like the others, I discovered, had as a public servant produced reforms and contributions that had greatly advanced the common weal. It all may not have been much—measured against his nauseous mouthings which would have caused the most hidebound Virginia reactionary to recoil—but it was something. One of the nastiest abettors of the hateful dogma purveyed below the Mason-Dixon line, he seemed to me also—while I brooded over the haggard figure in a baggy white Palm Beach suit, ravaged like one already seized by death’s hand even as he slouched past a frayed palm tree into the New Orleans clinic—one of its chief and most wretched victims, and the faintest breath of regret accompanied my murmured farewell. Suddenly, thinking of the South, thinking of Bilbo and once again of Bobby Weed, I was riven by a sharp blade of despondency. How long, Lord? I beseeched the begrimed and motionless chandeliers.

Just then I caught sight of Sophie at the instant she pushed open the grimy glass front door of the bar, where a slant of golden light somehow captured at exactly the right angle the lovely swerve of her cheekbone below the oval eyes with their sleepy-sullen hint of Asia, and the broad harmony of the rest of her face, including—or, I should say, especially—the fine, elongated, slightly uptilted “Polish schnoz,” as Nathan lovingly called it, which terminated in a nice little button. There were certain moments when through such a nonchalant gesture—opening a door, brushing her hair, throwing bread to the Prospect Park swans (it had something to do with motion, attitude, the tilt of head, a flow of arms, a swing of hips)—she created a continuum of beauty that was positively breath-taking. The tilt, the flow, the swing together made up an exquisite particularity that was nobody’s but Sophie’s, and yes, by God, it took the breath away. I mean this literally, for synchronous with the stunning effect she made on my eyes as she stood there arrested in the doorway—blinking at the gloom, her flaxen hair drenched in the evening gold—I listened to myself give a thin but quite audible and breathless half-hiccup. I was still moronically in love with her.

“Stingo, you’re all dressed up, where are you going, you’re wearing your cocksucker, you look so nice,” she said all in a tumbling rush, blushing crimson and correcting herself with a wonderful giggle even as I, too, formed the word seersucker! She giggled so much that, sitting down beside me, she buried her face on my shoulder. “Quelle horreur!”

“You’ve been hanging around Nathan too long,” I said, joining in her laughter. Her sexual idiom, I knew, was lifted entirely from Nathan. I had realized this since that moment when—describing some puritanical Cracovian town fathers who had endeavored to put a fig leaf on a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David—she had said