Sophie's Choice - William Styron [116]
Also, I knew it cost my father a great deal of emotional capital to venture into the great city, which he loathed utterly. His Southern hatred of New York was not the primitive, weirdly solipsistic hatred of the father of a college friend of mine from one of the more moistly paludal counties of South Carolina: this countryman’s refusal to visit New York was based on an apocalyptic and ever-haunting fantasy-scenario in which, seated at a Times Square cafeteria minding his own business, he finds the chair next to him preempted by a large, grinning, malodorous male Negro (politely or rudely preempted, it doesn’t matter; propinquity is the sole issue), whereupon he is forced to commit a felony through the necessity of seizing a Heinz Ketchup bottle and bashing it over the black bastard’s head. He then gets five years in Sing Sing. My father had less mad strictures about the city, though still intense ones. No such monstrous figment, no werewolf of race stalked the imagination of my father—a gentleman, a libertarian and a Jacksonian Democrat. He detested New York only for what he called its “barbarity,” its lack of courtesy, its total bankruptcy in the estimable domain of public manners. The snarling command of the traffic cop, the blaring insult of horns, all the needlessly raised voices of the night-denizens of Manhattan ravaged his nerves, acidified his duodenum, unhelmed his composure and his will. I wanted to see him very much, and was enormously touched that he would make the long trip north, endure the uproar and dare shoulder through the swarming, obstreperous and brutal human tides of the metropolis in order to visit his only offspring.
I waited a little restlessly for Sophie. Then my eyes lit upon something which totally captured my attention. On the third page of the Post that evening was an article, accompanied by a most unflattering photograph, concerning the notorious Mississippi race-baiter and demagogue, Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo. According to the story, Bilbo—whose face and utterances had saturated the media during the war years and those immediately following—had been admitted to the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans to undergo surgery for cancer of the mouth. One of the inferences that could be drawn from the piece was that Bilbo had left to him very little time. In the photograph he looked already a cadaver. Great irony in this, of course: “The Man” who had gained the loathing of “right-thinking” people everywhere, including the South, by his straightforward promiscuous public use of words like “nigger,” “coon,” “jigaboo,” contracting cancer in that symbolic portion of his anatomy. The petty tyrant from the piney woods who had called Mayor La Guardia of New York a “dago” and who had addressed a Jewish congressman as “Dear Kike” suffering a ripe carcinoma which would soon still that scurrilous jaw and evil tongue—it was all too much, and the Post laid on the irony with a dumptruck. After I read the piece, I gave a long sigh, thinking that I was awfully glad to see the old devil go. Of all those who had so foully tarnished the image of the modern South he was a leading mischief-maker, not really typical of Southern politicians but because of his blabbermouth and prominence rendering himself, in the eyes of the credulous and even not so credulous, an archetypal image of the Southern statesman and thus polluting the name of whatever was good and decent and even exemplary in the South as surely and as wickedly as those anonymous sub-anthropoids who had recently slaughtered Bobby Weed. I said to myself, again: Glad to see you go, you evil-spirited old sinner.
Yet even as the gentle brew took hold, softly marinating my senses, and I ruminated on Bilbo’s fate, I was overtaken by another emotion; I suppose it might be called regret—faint regret perhaps, yet regret. A lousy way to die, I thought. Cancer of that kind must be ghastly, those monstrous metastasizing cells so close to the brain—hideous little microscopic boll weevils invading cheek, sinuses, eye socket, jaw, filling the mouth with its fulminating virulence until the tongue, engulfed, rotted and fell dumb. I shuddered a little. Yet it was not simply this agonizing mortal blow which the senator had suffered that caused me my odd and vagrant pang. It was something else, abstract and remote, intangible yet worrisome to my spirit. I knew something about Bilbo