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PARTISAN REVIEW
came in, Isabel's mother showed him the letter and asked where he'd
been spending his time. And she finally got it out of him that he'd
been down in Greenwich Village, with musicians and other characters,
in a white girl's apartment. And this scared her and she started to
scream at him and what came up, once she began-though she denies
it
to this day- was what sacrifices they were making to give Sonny a
decent home and how little he appreciated it.
Sonny didn't play the piano that day. By evening, Isabel's
mother had calmed down but then there was the old man to deal
with, and Isabel herself. Isabel says she did her best to be calm but she
broke down and started crying. She says she just watched Sonny's
face. She could tell, by watching him, what was happening with him.
And what was happening was that they penetrated his cloud, they
had reached him. Even if their fingers had been a thousand times
more gentle than human fingers ever are, he could hardly help feeling
that they had stripped him naked and were spitting on that naked–
ness. For he also had to see that his presence, that music, which was
life or death to him, had been torture for them and that they had
endured it, not at
all
for his sake, but only for mine. And Sonny
couldn't take that. He can take it a little better today than he could
then but he's still not very good at it and, frankly, I don't know
anybody who is.
The silence of the next few days must have been louder than the
sound of all the music ever played since time began. One morning, be–
fore she went to work, Isabel was in his room for something and she
suddenly realized that all of his records were gone. And she
knew for certain that he was gone. And he was. He went as far as
the navy would carry him. He finally sent me a postcard from some
place in Greece and that was the first I knew that Sonny was still
alive. I didn't see him any more until we were both back in New
York and the war had long been over.
He was a man by then, of course, but I wasn't willing to see
it. He came by the house from time to time, but we fought almost
every time we met. I didn't like the way he carried hi.melf, loose
and dreamlike all the time, and I didn't like his friends, aRd his
music seemed to be merely an excuse for the life he led. It sounded
just that weird and disordered.
Then we had a fight, a pretty awful fight, and I didn't see him
