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By Root 12387 0

my spirit, exhausted me; all I really wanted to do was to curl up and take a nap. Confronting Nathan again this soon was an idea intimidating and fraught with potential menace; queasy, I felt myself perspiring as Nathan had done. To screw up courage I took my time and drank four or five or, maybe, six medium-sized glasses of Rheingold. Visions of Sophie’s pathetic and disheveled agony, her total disarray, kept flashing on and off in my mind, causing my stomach to heave. Finally, though, as dark fell over Flatbush, I wandered a little drunkenly back through the sultry dusk to the Pink Palace, gazing up with tangled apprehension and hope at the soft glow, the color of rose wine, that blossomed out from beneath Sophie’s window blind, indicating that she was there. I heard music; it was either her radio or her phonograph playing. I don’t know why I was at the same time so buoyed up and saddened by the lovely and plaintive sound of the Haydn concerto for cello, washing down soft on the summer evening when I approached the house. Children called through the twilight from the Parade Grounds at the park’s edge, and their cries, sweet as the piping of birds, mingled with the cello’s gentle meditation and pierced me with some profound, aching, all but unrecapturable remembrance.

I caught my breath in anguish at the sight which greeted me on the second floor. Had a typhoon swept through the Pink Palace, there could not have been a more horrendous effect of havoc and shambles. Sophie’s room looked as if it had been turned upside down; dresser drawers had been pulled out and emptied, the bed had been stripped, the closet ransacked. A litter of newspapers was strewn on the floor. The shelves had been emptied of books. The phonograph records were gone. Save for the paper debris, nothing was left. There was a single exception to the general look of plunder—the radio-phonograph. Doubtless too large and bulky to have been lugged off, it remained on the table, and the sound of the Haydn emanating from its gorge caused me an eerie chill, as if I were listening to music in a concert hall from which the audience had mysteriously fled. Only steps away, in Nathan’s room, the effect was the same: everything had been removed or, if not taken away, had been packed in cardboard boxes that looked ready for immediate transfer. The heat hung close and sticky in the hallway; it was heat unreasonably intense even for the summer evening—adding bafflement to the chagrin with which I was already overwhelmed—and for an instant I thought there must be a conflagration lurking behind the pink walls until I suddenly spied Morris Fink crouched in one corner, laboring over a steaming radiator.

“It must of got turned on by accident,” he explained, standing up as I approached. “Nathan must of turned it on by accident a little while ago when he was running around with his suitcase and things. There, you cocksucker,” he snarled at the radiator, giving it a kick, “that’ll fix your guts.” The steam expired with a little hiss and Morris Fink regarded me with his lugubrious lackluster eyes. An overbite I had not really noticed before made him look pronouncedly like a rodent. “This place for a while, it was like a cuckoo ranch.”

“What happened?” I said, cold with apprehension. “Where’s Sophie? Where’s Nathan?”

“They’re gone, both of them. They finally cut out for good.”

“What do you mean, for good?”

“Just what I said,” he replied. “Finished. For good. Gone for good, and fuckin’ good riddance, I say. There was something creepy, I mean sick about this house with that fuckin’ golem Nathan. All that fightin’ and screamin’. Fuckin’ good riddance, if you want to know.”

I felt desperation edging my voice as I demanded, “But where did they go? Did they tell you where they were going?”

“No,” he said, “they went in two directions.”

“Two directions? Do you mean...”

“I seen them come back in the house about two hours ago just when I was walkin’ up the street. I’d went out to a movie. Already he was howlin’ at her like a gorilla. I said to myself: Oh shit, another fight already,