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By Root 12526 0

see that she was clothed—“decent,” as girls used to say—I entered without knocking. Dressed in some kind of robe or housecoat, she stood at the far end of the big room combing her hair in front of a mirror. Her back was to me and for a moment I could tell she was unaware of my presence as she stroked the lustrous blond tresses with a sizzling sound, barely audible on the noontime stillness. Supercharged with a prurient residue—overflow, I imagine, of my Leslie daydreams—I had a sudden impulse to creep up behind Sophie and nuzzle her neck while filling my hands with her breasts. But the very thought was unconscionable and I belatedly realized, while I stood there in silence watching, that it was wrong enough of me to have stolen in on her in this way and violated her privacy, so I announced myself with a small, cough. She turned from the mirror with a startled gasp and in so doing revealed a face I shall never in my life forget. Dumfounded, I beheld—for a mercifully fleeting instant—an old hag whose entire lower face had crumpled in upon itself, leaving a mouth like a wrinkled gash and an expression of doddering senescence. It was a mask, withered and pitiable.

I was literally on the verge of crying out, but she beat me to it, making a gulping noise as she clapped her hands over her mouth and fled to the bathroom. I stood there in pounding embarrassment for long moments listening to the muffled sounds behind the bathroom door, aware now for the first time of the Scarlatti piano sonata that had been playing softly on the phonograph. Then, “Stingo, when are you going to learn to knock on a lady’s door?” I heard her call, more teasing in tone than truly cross. And then—only then—did I realize what I had witnessed. I was grateful that she had displayed no real anger, and was swiftly touched at this generosity of spirit, wondering what my own reaction might have been had / been caught without my teeth. And at that instant Sophie emerged from the bathroom, a faint flush still on her cheeks, but composed, even radiant, all the lovely components of her face reunited in a merry apotheosis of American dentistry. “Let’s go to the park,” she said, “I’m swooning with hunger. I am... the avatar of hunger!”

That “avatar,” of course, was quintessential Faulkner, and I was so tickled at the way she used the word, and by her restored beauty, that I found myself disgorging loud coarse cackles of laughter.

“Braunschweiger on rye, with mustard,” I said.

“Hot pastrami!” she replied.

“Salami and Swiss cheese on pumpernickel,” I went on, “with a pickle, half sour.”

“Stop it, Stingo, you’re killing me!” she cried with a golden laugh. “Let’s go!” And off we went to the park, via Himelfarb’s Deluxe Delicatessen.

Chapter Six

IT WAS THROUGH his older brother, Larry Landau, that Nathan had been able to get Sophie such a superb new set of dentures. And although it was Nathan’s own keen if nonprofessional diagnosis which so accurately pegged the nature of Sophie’s malady very soon after their encounter at the Brooklyn College library, his brother was instrumental in helping to find a cure for that problem too. Larry, whom I was to meet later on in the summer under very strained circumstances, was a urological surgeon with a large and prosperous practice in Forest Hills. A man in his mid-thirties, Nathan’s brother possessed a brilliant record in his field, having once been engaged—as a teaching fellow at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia—in some highly original and valuable research in kidney function which had won him excited attention in professional circles at an early age. Nathan mentioned this to me once in intensely admiring tones, obviously cherishing extravagant pride in his brother. Larry had also served in the war with grand distinction. As a senior lieutenant in the Navy medical corps he had performed brave and extraordinary feats of surgical skill while undergoing kamikaze attacks aboard a doomed flattop off the Philippines; the exploit won him the Navy Cross—a citation not too often achieved by a medical officer