Sophie's Choice - William Styron [283]
Mary Alice. Good Christ, Mary Alice. I will deal with Mary Alice almost immediately. She is important to this story for the perverse psychic effect she had on me—an effect which for a time, though mercifully brief, malignantly colored my final relationship with Sophie.
As for Sophie herself, and Nathan, I must briefly mention the little party we had at the Maple Court on the evening of my departure. It should have been a gay event—and to an outsider it would have appeared so—but there were two things about it which filled me with discomfort and foreboding. First, there was the matter of Sophie’s drinking. During the short space of time since Nathan’s return Sophie had, I noticed, abstained from the booze, possibly only because of Nathan’s cautionary presence; in the “old days” I had rarely seen either of them indulge much more in alcohol than their ritual bottle of Chablis. Now, however, Sophie had reverted to the drinking pattern she had adopted with me during Nathan’s absence, slugging down shot after shot of Schenley’s, though as usual holding it all rather well despite an eventual clumsiness of the tongue. I had no idea why she had gone back to the hard stuff. I said nothing, of course—Nathan being the ostensible master of the situation—but it troubled me painfully, troubled me that Sophie appeared to be so rapidly turning into a lush; and I was further disconcerted over the fact that Nathan did not seem to notice, or if he did, failed to take the protective measures that such heavy, distracted and potentially dangerous drinking called for.
That evening Nathan was his usual engaging, garrulous self, ordering for me schooners of beer until I was woozy and ready to float away. He captivated Sophie and me with a series of howlingly funny show-biz stories, profoundly Jewish, which he had picked up somewhere. I thought him to be in the healthiest shape I had seen him since the first day months before when he had laid siege to my consciousness and heart; I felt myself actually shivering with delight in the presence of such a funny, rambunctiously appealing human being, and then in one swift short statement he caused my good cheer to flow away like water gurgling down a drain. Just as we had risen to go back to the Pink Palace his tone turned serious, and gazing at me from that smoky region behind the pupil of the eye where I knew dementia lurked, he said, “I didn’t want to tell you this until now, so you’ll have something to think about tomorrow morning on your way to the country. But when you come back we’ll have something really incredible to celebrate. And that’s this: my research team is on the verge of announcing a vaccine against”—and here he paused and ceremoniously spelled out the word, so touched with fear in those days, in all of its involute syllables—“pol-i-o-my-e-li-tis.” Finis to infantile paralysis. No more March of Dimes. Nathan Landau, mankind’s deliverer. I wanted to cry. Doubtless I should have said something, but remembering all that Larry had told me, simply could not speak, and so I walked slowly back in the dark to Mrs. Zimmerman’s, listening to Nathan’s loony embroidery on tissue and cell cultivation, pausing once to whack Sophie on the back to exorcise her tipsy hiccups, but all the while remaining utterly without words as my heart filled up with pity and dread...
Even these many years later it would be pleasant to report that my stay in Rockland County brought me some sort of compensating release from my worries over Nathan and Sophie. A week or ten days of hard productive work and the jolly fornication which Jack Brown’s innuendoes had caused me to anticipate—such activities might have been sufficient reward for the anxiety I had suffered and, God help me, would suffer again soon to a degree I had not thought possible. But I recall the visit, or much of it, as a fiasco, and I have retained convincing evidence of this within the covers of the same notebook where earlier in this narrative I memorialized