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By Root 12419 0

he had ever known?), but in reality she was on the verge of becoming emotionally unhelmed, no more in command of her destiny than a puppy that has been hurled floundering into a turbulent pool. “Whoever it was that finger-fucked me that day in the subway made me see that,” she said. Even though she had been momentarily restored from that trauma, she knew she was on a downward slide—hurtling fatally and rapidly down—and she could hardly bear to think what might have happened to her had not Nathan (blundering like herself into the library on that momentous day, searching for an out-of-print copy of a book of short stories by Ambrose Bierce; bless Bierce! praise Bierce!) appeared like a redemptive knight from the void and restored her to life.

Life. That is what it was. He had actually given her life. He had (helped by the good offices of his brother Larry) restored her to health, causing her bloodsucking anemia to be corrected at Columbia Presbyterian, where the gifted Dr. Hatfield found a few other nutritional defects that needed straightening out. For one thing, he discovered that even after all these months she had the residual effects of scurvy. So he prescribed huge pills. Soon the ugly little skin hemorrhages, which had plagued her all over, disappeared, but even more remarkable was the change that came over her hair. Her golden hair had always been her most reassuring physical vanity, but having passed through Hades like the rest of her body, it had grown out scruffy, dull and fatigued-looking. Dr. Hatfield’s ministrations changed all that too, and it was not very long—six weeks or so—before Nathan was purring like a hungry tomcat into its luxuriance, stroking it compulsively and insisting that she should start modeling for shampoo ads.

Indeed, supervised by Nathan, the splendid apparatus of American medicine brought Sophie as close to a state of smiling fitness as could be wrought upon a person who had suffered such dreadful damage—and this included her marvelous new teeth. Her choppers, as Nathan referred to them, replaced the temporary false teeth which had been installed by the Red Cross in Sweden, and were the handiwork of still another friend and colleague of Larry’s—one of New York’s classiest practitioners of prosthodontia. Those teeth were hard to forget. They had to be the dental equivalent of Benvenuto Cellini. They were fabulous teeth, with a kind of icy, mother-of-pearl sparkle; every time she opened her mouth really wide I was reminded of Jean Harlow in smoochy close-ups, and on one or two memorably sunny days when Sophie burst into laughter those teeth lit up an entire room like a flashbulb.

So, brought back to the land of the living, she could only treasure the wonderful time she had with Nathan all through that summer and early fall. His generosity was exhaustless, and although a greed for luxury was not a component of her nature, she liked the good life and she accepted his bounty with pleasure—as much of her pleasure deriving from the delight which pure giving plainly gave to him as from the things themselves which he gave. And he gave her and shared in everything she could possibly have wanted: record albums of beautiful music, tickets to concerts, Polish books and French books and American books, divine meals in restaurants of every ethnic description all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. As with his nose for wine, Nathan had an informed palate (a reaction, he said, to a childhood surfeit of soggy kreplach and gefilte fish) and he took obvious joy in making her acquainted with New York’s incredible and manifold banquet.

Money itself never seemed to be of any object; his job at Pfizer obviously paid well. He bought her fine clothes (including the droll and beguiling matching “costumes” I first saw them dressed in), rings, earrings, bracelets, bangles, beads. Then there were the movies. During the war she had missed them with almost the same longing as she had missed music. In Cracow before the war there had been a period when she had drenched herself in American movies—the bland innocent romances