Sophie's Choice - William Styron [134]
“He introduced a program to combat ticks,” Nathan said.
Startled, I realized that Nathan’s gifted voice was in perfect mockery of my own—pedantic, pompous, insufferable. “There was a widespread outbreak of something called Texas fever among the Mississippi cows,” I persisted uncontrollably. “Bilbo was instrumental—”
“You fool,” Nathan interrupted, “you silly klutz. Texas fever! You clown! You want me to point out that the glory of the Third Reich was a highway system unsurpassed in the world and that Mussolini made the trains run on time?”
He had me cold—I must have known it as soon as I heard myself utter the word “ticks”—and the grin that had appeared briefly on his face, a sardonic flash of teeth and a twinkle that recognized the shambles of my defeat, dissolved even as he now firmly lowered his glass.
“Have you finished your lecture?” he demanded in a voice that was too loud. The menace that darkened his face caused me a prickly fear. Suddenly he raised his glass and downed the wine in a single swallow. “This toast,” he announced in a flat tone, “is in honor of my complete dissociation from you two creeps.”
A piercing pang of regret went through my breast at these words. I sensed a heavy emotion roiling inside me that was like the onset of mourning. “Nathan...” I began placatingly, and stretched out my hand. I heard Sophie sob again.
But Nathan ignored my gesture. “Dissociation,” he said, with a tip of his glass at Sophie, “from you, the Coony Chiropractic Cunt of Kings County.” Then to me, “And to you, the Dreary Dregs of Dixie.” His eyes were as lifeless as billiard balls, sweat drained from his face in torrents. I was as intensely conscious—on one level—of these eyes and the skin of his face beneath its shimmering transparency of sweat as I was—on a purely auditory level, so rawly sensitive that I thought my eardrums might pop—of the voices of the Andrews Sisters exploding from the jukebox. “Don’t Fence Me In!” “Now,” he said, “perhaps you will permit me to lecture the two of you. It might do something for the rottenness dwelling at the core of your selves.”
I will skim over all but the worst of his tirade. The whole thing could not have taken more than several minutes, but it seemed hours. Sophie suffered the most fearsome part of his onslaught, and it was plainly closer to intolerable to her than it was to me, who only had to hear it and watch her suffer. By contrast I got off with a relatively light tongue-lashing, and it came first. He bore me no real ill feelings, he said, just contempt. Even his contempt for me was hardly personal, he went on, since I could not be held responsible for my upbringing or place of birth. (He delivered all this with a mocking half-smile and a controlled, soft voice tinged, off and on, incongruously, with the Negro accent I recalled from that faraway Sunday.) For a long time he had entertained the idea that I was a good Southerner, he said, a man emancipated, one who had somehow managed to escape the curse of bigotry which history had bequeathed to the region. He was not so foolishly blind (despite my accusations) as to be unaware that good Southerners did truly exist. He had thought of me as such until recently. But my refusal now to