Sophie's Choice - William Styron [280]
I was silent for a long moment, trying to absorb as best I could all this information which validated so conclusively the misgivings I had had about Nathan—misgivings and suspicions which up until now I had successfully repressed. I sat there brooding, silent, and then a lovely dark-haired woman of about thirty entered the room, walked to Larry’s side and, touching his shoulder, said, “I’m going out for a minute, darling.” When I rose Larry introduced her to me as his wife, Mimi.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” she said, taking my hand, “I think maybe you can help us with Nathan. You know, we care so much for him. He’s talked about you so often that somehow I feel you’re a younger brother.”
I said something mild and accommodating, but before I could add anything else she announced, “I’m going to leave you two alone to talk. I hope I’ll see you again.” She was stunningly pretty and meltingly pleasant, and as I watched her depart, moving with easy undulant grace across the thick carpet of the room—which for the first time I perceived in all of its paneled, hospitably warm, book-lined, unostentatious luxury—my heart gave a heave: Why, instead of the floundering, broke, unpublished writer that I was, couldn’t I be an attractive, intelligent, well-paid Jewish urologist with a sexy wife?
“I don’t know how much Nathan ever told you about himself. Or about our family.” Larry poured me another ale.
“Not much,” I said, momentarily surprised that this indeed was so.
“I won’t bore you with a great deal of detail, but our father made—well, quite a few bucks. In, of all things, canning kosher soups. When he arrived here from Latvia he spoke not a word of English, and in thirty years he made, well, a bundle. Poor old man, he’s in a nursing home now—a very expensive nursing home. I don’t mean to sound vulgar. I’m only bringing this up to emphasize the kind of medical care the family has been able to afford for Nathan. He’s had the very best treatment that money can buy, but nothing has really worked on a permanent basis.’’
Larry paused, and with the pause came a drawn-out sigh, touched with hurt and melancholy. “So for all these last years it’s been in and out of Payne Whitney or Riggs or Menninger or wherever, with these long periods of relative tranquillity when he acts as normally as you or I. When we got him this little job at the Pfizer library we thought it might be a time when he had undergone a permanent remission. Such remissions or cures are not unheard of. In fact, there’s a reasonably high rate of cure. He seemed so content there, and although it did get back to us that he was boasting to people and magnifying his job all out of proportion, that was harmless enough. Even his grandiose delusions about creating some new medical marvel haven’t harmed anyone. It looked as if he had settled down, was on his way to—well, normality. Or as normal as a nut can ever become. But now there’s this sweet, sad, beautiful, fouled-up Polish girl of his. Poor kid. He’s told me they’re going to get married—and what do you, Stingo, think of that?”
“He can’t get married, can he, when he’s like this?” I said.
“Hardly.” Larry halted. “But how can one prevent him, either? If he were out-and-out uncontrollably insane, we would have to put him away forever. That would solve everything. But the terrible difficulty, you see, lies in the fact that there are these lengthy periods when he appears to be normal. And who is to say that one of these long remissions doesn’t really represent what amounts to a complete cure? There are many such cases on record. How can you penalize a man and prevent him from living a life like everyone else by simply assuming the worst, assuming that he will go completely berserk again, when such might not be the case? And yet suppose he marries that nice girl and suppose they have a baby. Then suppose he really goes off his rocker again. How unfair that would be to—well, to everyone!” After a moment’s silence he gazed at