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By Root 12517 0

in her private dressing room—a sanctum never penetrated by Blackstock—were over seventy empty quart bottles of Southern Comfort, which the poor woman apparently dreaded to risk disposing of, although she plainly had no trouble acquiring the powerful sweet elixir and stowing it away by the case. Blackstock realized—or allowed himself to realize—only when it was too late that this had been going on for months, maybe years. “If only I hadn’t pampered her so,” he grieved to Sophie. “If only I had faced up to the fact that she was a—” he hesitated at the word—“a lush. I could have put her into psychoanalytical therapy, had her cured.” His recriminations were terrible to hear. “It’s my fault, all mine!” he wept. And chief among his assemblage of griefs was this: that basically aware of her awful plight, he had still permitted her to drive an automobile.

Sylvia was his precious pet, and that is what he called her. My pet. He had no one else to really squander his money on, and so, instead of voicing the standard husband’s complaint, he actually encouraged her frequent buying sprees to Manhattan. There with some female friend—flush, plump and idle like herself—she would sweep through Altman and Bergdorf and Bonwit and half a dozen other fancy shops and return to Queens with the back seat stacked high with boxes of ladies’ merchandise, most of which languished in pristine condition in her bureau drawers or got stuffed into the recesses of her many closets, where Blackstock later found score upon score of unused gowns and dresses faintly smudged with mildew. What Blackstock did not know until the sad fact was past undoing was that after her orgy of shopping she usually got drunk with her companion of the day; she favored the lounge of the Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue where the bartender was friendly, indulgent and discreet But her ability to cope with the Southern Comfort—which even at the Westbury remained her steady tipple—was being swiftly undermined, and the disaster when it struck was sudden, terrifying and, as I say, almost indecently bizarre.

Returning to St. Albans one afternoon by way of the Triborough Bridge, she lost control of the car while driving at ferocious speed (the police said that the speedometer was frozen at eighty-five miles an hour), smashed into the rear end of a truck and spun out against the guardrail of the bridge, where the Chrysler was instantly transmuted into steel splinters and plastic shards. Sylvia’s friend, a Mrs. Braunstein, died three hours later in a hospital. Sylvia herself was decapitated, which in itself was ghastly enough; it was intolerable that to Blackstock’s nearly insane grief was added the knowledge that the head itself vanished, catapulted by the immense impact into the East River. (There are in the lives of all of us odd instances where one later crosses the path of someone associated with what one regarded as an abstract public event; that spring I had with a small shudder read the Daily Mirror headline RIVER SEARCH CONTINUES FOR WOMAN’S HEAD, scarcely realizing that I would soon have at least a distant connection with the victim’s spouse.)

Blackstock was virtually a suicide. His grief was an inundation—Amazonian, He suspended his end of the practice indefinitely, leaving his patients to the ministrations of his assistant, Seymour Katz. He announced piteously that he might never resume practice, but retire to Miami Beach. The doctor had no near relatives, and in his wild bereavement—so deep and burningly felt that she could not help but be moved by it—Sophie found herself acting as a kind of surrogate kin, a younger sister or daughter. During the several days while the search for Sylvia’s head went on, Sophie was at his side in the St. Albans house almost constantly, fetching him sedatives, brewing him tea, patiently listening to his dirge for his wife. Dozens of people moved in and out, but she was his mainstay. There was the matter of the funeral—he refused to have her buried headless; steeling herself, Sophie had to absorb much gruesome theoretical talk about this problem.