Sophie's Choice - William Styron [191]
Yet there he was, half an hour later, sipping straight bourbon and railing against the North’s “patent on virtue.” He had bled a lot, but by the sheerest chance the “house doctor” of the McAlpin had been roaming through the lobby just at the moment that I shepherded the victim in. The house doctor appeared to be a seedy alcoholic, but he knew how to take care of a shiner. Cold water and a bandage had finally stanched the blood, though not the old man’s outrage. Nursing his wound in the shadows of the McAlpin bar, with his swollen eye looking more and more the simulacrum of his own father divested of half his sight eighty-odd years before at Chancellorsville, he continued to curse Thomas McGuire’s guts in a litany of hopeless spleen. It got to be a little tiresome, picturesque as the language was, and I realized that the old man’s ire was founded upon neither snobbishness nor prudery—as a shipyard worker and, before that, as a merchant mariner, his ears had surely overflowed with such billingsgate—but upon something as uncomplicated as an abiding belief in good manners and public decency. “Fellow citizens!” It actually was a kind of frustrated egalitarianism out of which, I began to understand, he derived much of his sense of alienation. Simply put, people abrogated their equality when they were unable to speak to each other in human terms. Calming down, he abandoned McGuire finally and let his animus spread out and embrace in a general way all the multifarious sins and failings of the North: its arrogance, its hypocritical claim to moral superiority. Suddenly I saw how much of an unreconstructed Southerner he really was, and was struck by the fact that this seemed in no way to contradict his basic liberalism.
At last the diatribe—perhaps combined with the shock of his injury, relatively slight as it was—appeared to exhaust him; he turned pale and I urged him to go upstairs to bed. This he reluctantly did, stretching himself out on one of the twin beds of the room he had reserved for the two of us five floors above the noisy avenue. I was to spend two restlessly insomniac and (largely because of my continuing despair over Sophie and Nathan) demoralized nights there, awash with sweat beneath a humming black spider of an electric fan that dispensed air in puny puffs. In spite of his fatigue, my father kept harping on the South. (I realized later that at least part of his visit was in effect a subtle mission to rescue me from the clutches of the North; although he never let on in direct terms, the old slyboots had surely dedicated much of his trip to an attempt to preserve me from going over to the Yankees.) That first night his last thoughts before he went off to sleep had to do with his hope that I would leave this confusing city and come back down to the country where I belonged. His voice was faraway as it mumbled something about “human dimensions.”
The several days were spent just as one might imagine a twenty-two-year-old youth would while away the hours with a generally discontented Southern daddy during a New York summer. We visited a couple of tourist attractions which both of us confessed to never having visited before: the Statue of Liberty and the roof of the Empire State Building. We took a sightseeing boat trip around Manhattan. We went to the Radio City Music Hall, drowsing there through a comedy with Robert Stack and Evelyn Keyes. (I recall how, during this ordeal, my mourning over Sophie and Nathan enveloped me like a shroud.) We looked in at the Museum of Modern Art, a place which, rather condescendingly, I thought might offend the old man, who instead seemed thoroughly exhilarated—the clean bright orthogonal Mondrians bringing special delight to his technician’s eye. We ate at Horn and Hardart’s amazing automat, at Nedick’s and Stouffer’s and—in a fling at what in those days I deemed haute cuisine—at a midtown Longchamps. We went to one or two bars (including, accidentally, a gay joint on Forty-second Street, where I watched my father’s face, as it confronted the smirking apparitions, turn gray like oatmeal,