Sophie's Choice - William Styron [131]
Like a terrified child clutching at Daddy in the vortex of a mob, Sophie squeezed down on my fingers. We both watched Nathan stiffly shoulder his way to the bar through shoals of shirt-sleeved drinkers. I turned to look at Sophie then. Her eyes were completely out of kilter, unforgettably so in the face of Nathan’s threat. I would ever after define the word “distraught” by the raw fear I saw dwelling there. “Oh, Stingo,” she moaned, “I knew this was going to happen. I just knew he would accuse me of being unfaithful. He always does when he come into these strange tempêtes. Oh, Stingo, I just can’t bear it when he become like this. I just know this time he’s going to leave me.”
I tried to soothe her. “Don’t worry,” I said, “he’ll get over this thing.” I had small faith in those words.
“Oh no, Stingo, something terrible will happen, I know it! Always he get this way. First he is so excited, full of joy. Then he comes down, and when he comes down, it is always that I have been unfaithful and then he wants to leave me.” She squeezed again, so hard I thought that her fingernails might draw blood. “And what I said to him was true,” she added in a frantic hurry. “I mean about Seymour Katz. It was nothing, Stingo, nothing at all. This Dr. Katz means nothing to me, he is only someone I work for with Dr. Blackstock. And it is true what I said about him fixing the phonograph. That is all he did in the room, fix the phonograph, nothing else, I swear to you!”
“Sophie, I believe you,” I assured her, in a torture of embarrassment over the babbling vehemence with which she was trying to convince me, who was already convinced. “Just calm down,” I snapped at her futilely.
What happened rapidly thereafter seemed to me unimaginably senseless and horrible. And I realize how faulty were my own perceptions, how clumsily I handled the situation, with what lack of wit and with what ineffectiveness did I deal with Nathan at a moment when supreme delicacy was called for. For if I had only humored Nathan, jollied him along, I just might have watched him expend all of his rage—no matter how unreasonable and intimidating it was—and out of pure exhaustion fall into a state where I might have found him manageable, his fury smothered or at least on a tether. I might have been able to control him. But I also realize that I was at that time in many ways afflicted by a staggeringly puerile inexperience: far from my mind was any idea that Nathan—despite his manic tone of voice, the hectic oratory, the sweat, the walleyed expression, the frazzled tension, the whole portrait he presented of one whose entire nervous system down to its minutest ganglia was in the throes of a fiery convulsion—might be dangerously disturbed. I thought he was merely being a colossal prick. As I say, this was largely due to my age and a real guilelessness. Distracted, violent states in human beings having been alien to my experience—bound up as it had been less with the crazy Gothic side of a Southern upbringing than with the genteel and the well-behaved—I regarded Nathan’s outburst as a shocking failure of character, a lapse of decency, rather than the product of some aberration of mind.
This was as true now as it had been on that first night weeks ago in Yetta’s hallway when, as he stormed at Sophie and taunted me about lynchings and snarled “Cracker” in my face, I had caught a glimpse in his fathomless eyes of a wild, elusive discord that sent icewater flooding through my veins. And so as I sat there with Sophie, numb with discomfort, grieving at the appalling transformation which had overtaken this man whom I so cared for and admired, yet with indignation scraping me raw over the anguish he was forcing Sophie to endure, I resolved that I would draw the line as to how far Nathan would proceed in his harassment. He would bully Sophie no more, I decided, and he