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By Root 12319 0

the South. Said your name’s Stingo. Yetta needs a Southerner in her house to fit in with all the other funnies.” He sent a dark glance back toward Sophie, then looked at me and said, “Too bad I won’t be around for a lively conversation, but I’m getting out of here. It would have been nice to talk with you.” And here his tone became faintly ominous, the forced civility tapering off into the baldest sarcasm I had heard in a long time. “We’d have had great fun, shootin’ the shit, you and I. We could have talked about sports. I mean Southern sports. Like lynching niggers—or coons, I think you call them down there. Or culture. We could have talked about Southern culture, and maybe could have sat around here at old Yetta’s listening to hillbilly records. You know, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff and all those other standard bearers of classical Southern culture.” He had been scowling as he spoke, but now a smile parted his dark, troubled face and before I knew it he had reached out and clasped my unwilling hand in a firm handshake. “Ah well, that’s what could have been. Too bad. Old Nathan’s got to hit the road. Maybe in another life, Cracker, we’ll get together. So long, Cracker! See you in another life.”

And then, before my lips could part to utter protest or counter with an outraged sally or insult, Nathan had turned and pounded down the steps to the sidewalk, where his hard leather heels made a demonic clack-clack-clack as the sound receded, then faded out beneath the darkening trees, in the direction of the subway.

It is a commonplace that small cataclysms—an automobile accident, a stalled elevator, a violent assault witnessed by others—bring out an unnatural communicativeness among total strangers. After Nathan had disappeared into the night, I approached Sophie without hesitation. I had no idea what I was about to say—doubtless some gauche words of comfort—but it was she who spoke first, behind hands clenched to a tear-stained face. “It is so unfair of him,” she sobbed. “Oh, I love him so!”

I did the clumsy thing they often do in movies at such a point, when dialogue is a problem. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and silently gave it to her. She took it readily and began to mop at her eyes. “Oh, I love him so much!” she exclaimed. “So much! So much! I’ll die without him.”

“There, there,” I said, or something equally awful.

Her eyes implored me—I whom she had never before laid eyes on—with the despairing plea of an innocent prisoner protesting her virtue before the bar. I’m no whore, your honor, she seemed to be trying to say. I was flabbergasted both by her candor and her passion. “It is so unfair of him,” she said again. “To say that! He is the only man I have ever made love to, except my husband. And my husband’s dead!” And she was shaken by more sobs, and more tears poured forth, turning my handkerchief into a wet little monogrammed sponge. Her nose was swollen with grief and the pink tear stains marred her extraordinary beauty, but not so much that the beauty itself (including the mole, felicitously placed near the left eye, like a tiny satellite) failed to melt me on the spot—a distinct feeling of liquefaction emanating not from the heart’s region but, amazingly, from that of the stomach, which began to churn as if in revolt from a prolonged fast. I hungered so deeply to put my arms around her, to soothe her, that it became pure discomfort, but a cluster of oddly assorted inhibitions caused me to hold back. Also, I would be a liar if I did not confess that through all this there rapidly expanded in my mind a strictly self-serving scheme, which was that somehow, God granting me the luck and strength, I would take over this flaxen Polish treasure where Nathan, the thankless swine, had left off.

Then a tingling sensation in the small of my back made me realize that Nathan was behind us again, standing on the front steps. I wheeled about. He had managed to return in phantasmal silence and now glared at the two of us with a malevolent gleam, leaning forward with one arm outstretched against the frame of the door. “And