Sophie's Choice - William Styron [181]
It was then that I witnessed an episode which illustrated the sad, schismatic division of North and South more starkly than any conceivable work of art or sociology. And it involved two grievous, mutually unpardonable mistakes, each embedded in a cultural overview which was separated from the other as Saskatoon is from Patagonia. The initial mistake surely was my father’s. Although gratuities in the South—at least up until that time—had been in general eschewed or never taken seriously, he should have known better than to tip Thomas McGuire a nickel—wiser to give no tip at all. McGuire’s mistake was to react by snarling at my father, descriptively: “fucking asshole.” This is not to say that a Southern cabdriver, unaccustomed to tips or at any rate accustomed to receiving few tips and those erratically, might not have felt a little stung; yet however violently he might have bristled inwardly, he would have kept his peace. Nor does it mean that the ears of a New Yorker might not have burned at McGuire’s epithet; but such words are the common coin of the streets and of taxi drivers, and most New York denizens would have swallowed their gall and likewise kept their mouths shut.
Partway out of the cab, my father poked his nose back into the front window and said, in a nearly incredulous voice, “What did I hear you say?” The phrasing is important—not “What did you say?” or “What’s that you said?” but with the emphasis on “hear,” a sense that the auditory apparatus itself had never before experienced such vile obscenities, not even separately, much less uttered in tandem. McGuire was a blur of thick neck and reddish hair in the shadows. I did not get a good look at his face, but the voice was fairly young. If he had sped off into the night, then all might have been well, but although I sensed a slight hesitancy, I also felt an intransigence, a feisty Hibernian umbrage at my father’s nickel that matched the old man’s rage at this indefensible language. When McGuire answered he even supplied a considerably more grammatical shape to his thought: “I said you must be some fucking asshole.”
My father’s voice became a restrained cry—not really loud but throbbing with fury—as he sought retribution. “And I think you must be part of the bottomless dregs of this loathsome city that spawned you and all your foul-mouthed breed!” he declaimed, shifting like lightning into the timeless rhetorical mode of his ancestors. “Detestable scum that you are, you are no more civilized than a sewer rat! In any decent place in the United States a person like you disgorging your disgusting filth would be taken out in a public square and horsewhipped!” His voice rose a bit; pedestrians halted beneath the McAlpin’s blazing marquee.