Sophie's Choice - William Styron [60]
Nathan once referred to the way in which he and Sophie met as having been “cinematic.” By this he meant that they had met not as most people do, thrown together by the common circumstance of upbringing or school or office or neighborhood, but in the delightful and haphazard way of those romantic strangers of Hollywood daydreams, those lovers-to-be whose destinies became intertwined from the first twinkling of their chance encounter: John Garfield and Lana Turner, for instance, utterly doomed from the instant of their mingled glance in a roadside café, or, more whimsically, William Powell and Carole Lombard on hands and knees at the jeweler’s, their skulls colliding as they search for an elusive diamond. On the other hand, Sophie attributed the convergence of their paths simply to the failure of chiropractic medicine. Suppose, she sometimes later mused, that all of Dr. Blackstock’s ministrations and those of his young associate, Dr. Seymour Katz (who came in after office hours to help take care of the prodigious overflow of sufferers), had worked; suppose the chain of events that led from the vandalizing finger to the sacral vertebra to the compressed fifth lumbar nerve not only had proved not to be a chiropractic chimera but had been terminated in triumph, radiantly, healthfully, as a result of Blackstock’s and Katz’s fortnight of thumping and stretching and drubbing of her tormented spine.
Cured in this fashion, she never would have met Nathan, no doubt of that. But the trouble was that all the vigorous treatment she submitted to only made her feel worse. It made her feel so horrible that she overcame her unwillingness to hurt Blackstock’s sensibilities, telling him that none of her symptoms had subsided and that in fact they had grown more nagging and alarming. “But, my darling girl,” Blackstock exclaimed, shaking his head, “you’ve gotta feel better!” Two full weeks had gone by, and when Sophie suggested to the doctor, with great reticence, that perhaps she was in need of an M.D., a real diagnostician, he flew into the closest approximation of a rage she had ever seen in this almost pathologically benign man. “A doctor of medicine you want? Some fancy gozlin from Park Slope that’ll rob you blind! My darling girl, better you should take yourself to a veterinarian!” To her despair, he then proposed to treat her with an Electro-Sensilator, a newly developed and complicated-looking device, shaped rather like a small refrigerator and containing many wires and gauges, which was supposed to rearrange the molecular structure of her spinal bone cells and which he had just acquired (“for a pretty penny,” he said, adding to her store of idiomatic English) from world chiropractic headquarters somewhere in Ohio or Iowa—states whose names she always got confused.
The morning of the day that she was scheduled to submit to the Electro-Sensilator’s macabre embrace she woke up feeling exceptionally worn-out and sick, far worse than ever before. It was her day off from work and so she drowsed through the forenoon, coming fully awake only around twelve. She recalled clearly of that morning that in her febrile doze—a half-sleep in which the far past of Cracow was curiously, senselessly intermingled with the smiling presence and sculpting hands of Dr. Blackstock—she kept dreaming with mysterious obsessiveness of her father. Humorless, forbidding in his starched wing collar, his oval unrimmed professorial spectacles and black mohair suit odorous of cigar smoke, he lectured her in German with the same ponderous intensity she remembered from her childhood; he seemed to be warning her about something—was he concerned about her sickness?—but when each time she struggled up like a swimmer out of slumber his words bubbled away and fled from her memory, and she was left only with the fading apparition of her father, comfortless and severe, somehow even vaguely threatening. At last—mainly now to throw off this irrepressible image—she forced herself to get out of bed and face the meltingly lush and beautiful summer day. She was quite shaky on her feet and was aware that again she had no appetite at all. She had been conscious for a long time of the paleness of her skin, but on this morning a glance in the bathroom mirror truly horrified her, brought her close to panic: her face was as devoid of any of the animating pink of life as those bleached skulls of ancient monks she recalled from the underground sepulcher of an Italian church.