Sophie's Choice - William Styron [180]
“I admire your spunk tremendously,” my father had said while we ate a late dinner at a Schrafft’s. “The seventy-two hours I plan to spend in this burg is about all most mortal men from civilized parts can stand. I don’t know how you do it. Your youth, I suppose, that wonderful flexibility of your age that allows you to be beguiled by, rather than devoured by, this octopus of a city. I’ve never been there, but really, is it possibly true that, as you wrote me, there are parts of Brooklyn that remind one of Richmond?”
Despite the long train ride up from the depths of the Tidewater my father was in a splendid mood, which helped me take my mind off my spiritual disarray, at least fitfully. He mentioned that he had not been to New York since the late 1930s and that, if anything, the city appeared more Babylonian in its dissolute wealth than ever. “It’s a product of the war, son,” said this engineer who had helped fabricate such naval behemoths as the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise, “everything in this country has become richer and richer. It took that war to bail us out of the Depression and in the process to turn us into the most powerful nation on earth. If there’s one single thing that’s going to keep us ahead of the Communists for many years, it’s just that: money, and we’ve got lots of it.” (It should not be assumed from this allusion that my father was even remotely a Red-baiter. As I say, he was notably left-leaning for a Southerner: six or seven years later, at the height of the McCarthy hysteria, he furiously resigned as president-elect of the Virginia chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, to which for largely genealogical reasons he had belonged for a quarter of a century, when that mossback organization issued a manifesto in support of the Senator from Wisconsin.)
Yet no matter how sophisticated they may be in matters of economics, sojourners from the South (or anywhere else in the hinterland) rarely fail to be dumfounded by New York’s tariffs and prices, and my father was no exception, grumbling darkly over the dinner check for two: I think it was around four dollars—imagine!—which was hardly exorbitant by metropolitan standards in that deflated time, and even for Schrafft’s profoundly ordinary fare. “For four dollars at home,” he complained, “you could feast all weekend.” He regained his composure quickly, though, as we strolled through the balmy night up Broadway, north through Times Square—a place which caused the old man to adopt an expression of dazed and pious speculation, although he was never a pious person and his reaction came, I think, less from real disapproval than from the shock, like a slap in the face, of the area’s raunchy weirdness.
It occurs to me that compared to the reptilian Sodom into which it later evolved, Times Square that summer offered scarcely more in the way of carnal corruption than some dull beige plaza in a Christly town like Omaha or Salt Lake City; nonetheless, it had its share of sleazy hustlers and garish freaks strutting through the rainbows and whirlpools of neon, even then, and it helped a little in the way of distracting me from my deep gloom to hear his whispered expletives—he could still utter “Jeru-salem!” with the rustic openness of a character out of Sherwood Anderson—and to watch his gaze, following the iridescent rayon undulations of some chichi mulatto whore, reflect in quick sequence glassy incredulity and a certain ineluctable itch. Did he ever get laid? I wondered. A widower for nine years, he surely deserved to, but like most Southerners (or Americans, for that matter) of his vintage he was reticent, even secretive, about sex, and his life in that sphere was to me a mystery. In truth, I hoped that in his mature state he had not allowed himself to be sacrificed on the altar of Onan, like his hapless offspring; or could it simply be that just now I had misinterpreted his glance and that he was mercifully free of that fever at last?
At Columbus Circle we hailed a taxi and headed back to the McAlpin. I must have fallen into my despondent mood again, for I heard him say,