William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (276 page)

Sophie slept. Tenderly I wondered how many days and nights she would be drowsing next to me in the coming years. I speculated on our matrimonial bed at the farm, thought of its size and shape, wondered if its mattress was constructed with sufficient amplitude, bounce and resilience to accommodate the industrious venery it would certainly receive. I thought of our children, the many young towheads skipping around the farm like little Polish buttercups and thistles, and my merry paternal commands: “Time to milk the cow, Jerzy!” “Wanda, feed the chickens!” “Tadeusz! Stefania! Close up the barn!” I thought of the farm itself, which I had not seen outside of my father’s snapshots, tried to visualize it as the abode of a prominent literary figure. Like Faulkner’s Mississippi home, “Rowan Oak,” it would have to be given a name, one possibly appropriate to the peanut crop that provided its reason for being. “Goober Haven” was far and away too facetious, and I abandoned all other changes on the nut motif, playing instead with names more tony, stately, dignified: “Five Elms” perhaps (I hoped the farm had five elms, or even one) or “Rosewood,” or “Great Fields,” or “Sophia,” in tribute to my beloved dame. In my mind’s prism the years like blue hills rolled peacefully away toward the horizon of the far future.
Inheritance of Night
a remarkable success, gaining laurels rarely shed upon the work of a writer so young. A short novel then, also acclaimed, having to do with my wartime experiences—a taut, searing book eviscerating the military in a tragicomedy of the absurd. Meanwhile, Sophie and I living on the modest plantation in dignified seclusion, my reputation growing, the author himself being increasingly importuned by the media but steadfastly refusing all interviews. “I just farm peanuts,” says he, going about his work. At age thirty or thereabouts another masterpiece,
These Blazing Leaves,
the chronicle of that tragic Negro firebrand Nat Turner.

The train lurched forward, began to churn with smooth and oily precision as it gained momentum, and my vision evaporated in an effervescent blur against the grimy, receding walls of Rahway.

Sophie awoke abruptly, with a little cry. I glanced down at her. She seemed a bit feverish; her brow and cheeks were flushed, and a fragile, dewy mustache of perspiration hovered above her lip. “Where are we, Stingo?” she said.

“Somewhere in New Jersey,” I replied.

“How long does it take, this trip to Washington?” she asked.

“Oh, between three and four hours,” I said.

“And then to the farm?”

“I don’t know exactly. We’ll get a train to Richmond, then a bus down to Southampton. It’ll be quite a few more hours. It’s practically in North Carolina. That’s why I think we’ve got to spend the night in Washington and then head down to the farm tomorrow morning. We could stop in Richmond for the night, I guess, but this way you’ll get to see a little bit of Washington.”

“Okay, Stingo,” she said, taking my hand. “I’ll do whatever you say.” After a silence she said, “Stingo, would you go get me some water?”

“Sure.” I pressed down the aisle crowded with people, mostly servicemen, and near the vestibule found the fountain, where I trickled warm unsavory-looking water into a paper cup. When I returned, still airily elated by my fanciful pipe dreams, my spirits sank like pig iron at the sight of Sophie clutching a full pint bottle of Four Roses which she had plucked from her suitcase.

“Sophie,” I said gently, “for God’s sake, it’s
morning
still. You haven’t even had breakfast. You’re going to get cirrhosis of the liver.”

“That’s all right,” she said, sloshing whiskey into the cup. “I had a doughnut at the station. And a Seven-Up.”

I groaned softly, aware from past experience that there was no way of dealing with this problem short of complicating matters and creating a scene. The most I could hope for would be to catch her off guard and swipe the bottle, as I had done once or twice before. I sank back in my seat. The train sped across New Jersey’s satanic industrial barrens, the clickety-clack momentum hurling us past squalid slums, sheet-metal sheds, goofy drive-ins with whirling signs, warehouses, bowling alleys built like crematoriums, crematoriums built like roller rinks, swamps of green chemical slime, parking lots, barbarous oil refineries with their spindly upright nozzles ejaculating flame and mustard-yellow fumes. What would Thomas Jefferson have thought, viewing this? I mused. Sophie, jittery, restless, alternately gazed out at this landscape and poured whiskey into her cup, finally turning to me to say, “Stingo, does this train stop anywhere between here and Washington?”

“Only for a minute or two to take on passengers or let them off. Why?”

“I want to make a telephone call.”

“Who to?”

“I want to call and find out about Nathan. I want to see if he’s all right.”

Ogreish gloom encompassed me in recapitulation of the agony of the night before. I took Sophie’s arm and squeezed it hard, too hard; she winced. “Sophie,” I said, “listen. Listen to me. That part is
over.
There is nothing you can do. Can’t you realize that he actually was on the point of
killing us both
? Larry will come down from Toronto and locate Nathan and—well,
deal
with him. After all, he’s his brother, his closest relative. Nathan is
insane,
Sophie! He’s got to be...
institutionalized.
”

She had begun to weep. The tears spilled down around her fingers, which suddenly looked very thin, pink and emaciated as she clutched her cup. And once again I was conscious of that pitiless blue toothbite of a tattoo on her forearm. “I just don’t know how I’m going to face things, I mean, without him.” She paused, sobbing. “I could call Larry.”

“You couldn’t reach him now,” I insisted, “he must be on a train somewhere near Buffalo.”

“Then I could call Morris Fink. He might be able to tell me if Nathan came back to the house. Sometimes, you know, he would do that when he was on a high. He would come back and take some Nembutal and sleep it off. Then when he woke up he would be all right. Or almost all right. Morris would know if he did that this time.” She blew her nose, continuing to make little hiccupy sobs.

“Oh, Sophie, Sophie,” I whispered, wanting to say but unable to say,
“It’s all over.”

Thundering into the station in Philadelphia, the train screeched and shuddered to a stop amid the sunless cavern, touching me with a pang of nostalgia I could scarcely have foreseen. In the window I caught a glimpse of my reflected face, pale from too much indoor literary endeavor, and behind that face I thought for an instant I saw a younger replica—my little-boy self over ten years before. I laughed out loud at the remembrance, and suddenly invigorated and inspired, resolved both to distract Sophie from her gathering disquiet and to cheer her up, or try to.

“This is Philadelphia,” I said.

“Is it a big place?” she asked. Her curiosity, though lachrymal, encouraged me.

“Mmm, medium big. Not a huge metropolis like New York, but big enough. I would think about the size of Warsaw maybe, before the Nazis got to it. It was the first truly big city I ever saw in my life.”

“When was that?”

“Back around 1936, when I was eleven. I’d never been to the North before. And I remember the funniest damn story about the day I arrived. I had an aunt and uncle living in Philadelphia, and my mother—this was about two years before she died—decided to send me up here for a week’s visit in the summer. She sent me by myself, on a Greyhound bus. Little kids traveled alone a lot in those days, it was perfectly safe. Anyway, it was an all-day trip on the bus—it went the long way around from the Tidewater to Richmond, then up to Washington and through Baltimore. My mother had the colored cook—her name was Florence, I remember—fix me a big paper bag full of fried chicken and I had a thermos of cold milk—very gourmet travel cuisine, you understand, and I gobbled my lunch somewhere between Richmond and Washington, and then along about midafternoon the bus stopped in Havre de Grace—”

“Like the French, you mean?” Sophie said. “Harbor...”

“Yes, it’s a small town in Maryland. We’ll be going through it. Anyway, we all trooped out at a rest stop, a tacky little restaurant where you could take a pee and where they sold soda pop and such, and I saw this horse-racing machine. In Maryland, you see, unlike Virginia, they had a certain amount of legal gambling and you could put a nickel in this machine and bet on one of, oh, say a dozen tiny metal horses running down a track. I remember my mother had given me exactly four dollars spending money—that was a lot of money in the Depression—and I got very excited at the idea of betting on a horse, so I put in my nickel. Well, Sophie, you can’t imagine. That goddamned machine hit the jackpot—you know what jackpot means? Everything lit up and out came an absolute
torrent
of nickels—dozens of them,
scores
of them. I couldn’t believe it! I must have won fifteen dollars’ worth of nickels. They were all over the floor. I was out of my mind with happiness. But the problem was, you see, how to transport all this loot. I remember I was wearing these little white linen short pants and I stuffed all these nickels into the pockets, but even so, there were so many of them that they just kept spilling out all over everywhere. And the worst part was this: there was this mean-looking woman who ran the place, and when I asked her to please exchange my nickels for dollar bills she flew into a terrible rage, screaming at me that you had to be eighteen to play the horse-race machine and that I was obviously still wet behind the ears and that she’d lose her license and if I didn’t get the hell out of there, she’d call the police.”

“You were eleven,” said Sophie, taking my hand. “I can’t believe Stingo at eleven. You must have been a cute little boy in your white linen short pants.” Sophie was still pink-nosed, but the tears had momentarily stopped and in her eyes I thought I saw a sparkle of something like amusement.

“So I got back on this bus for the rest of the drive to Philadelphia. It was a long way. Every time I made the slightest move a nickel or several of them would slip out of these bulging pockets of mine and roll down the aisle. And when I’d get up to retrieve them it would make it only worse, because more nickels would fall out and roll away. The driver was half crazy by the time we got to Wilmington and all through the trip the passengers were looking down at this trickle of money.” I paused, gazing out at the faceless shadow figures on the station platform, which moved away in soundless retrograde as the train pulled out now, gently vibrating. “Anyway,” I said, returning the squeeze Sophie gave my hand, “the final tragedy happened at the bus station, which must be not far from here. That evening my aunt and uncle were waiting for me and when I ran toward them I tripped and fell down flat on my little ass, my pockets split, and almost every goddamned one of those nickels poured out off the ramp and underneath the buses into this dark parking bay far down below, and I think when my uncle picked me up and brushed me off, there were about five nickels left in my pockets. The others were gone forever.” I halted, tickled at this sweetly absurd fable which I had told Sophie truthfully, with no need for embroidery. “It is a cautionary tale,” I added, “about the destructive nature of greed.”

Sophie held one hand to her face, obscuring her expression, but since her shoulders were trembling I thought she had succumbed to laughter. I was mistaken. There were tears again, tears of anguish from which she simply could not seem to free herself. Suddenly I realized that I must have inadvertently summoned up memories of her little boy. I let her cry in silence for a while. Then the weeping became less. Finally she turned to me and said, “Down in Virginia where we’re going, Stingo, do you think there will be a Berlitz school, a school for language?”

“What on earth would you want that for?” I said. “You already know more languages than anyone I know.”

“It would be for English,” she replied. “Oh, I know I speak it good now, and even read it, but what I must learn to do is to write it. I’m so poor at writing English. The spelling is so very strange.”

“Well, I don’t know, Sophie,” I said, “there are probably language schools in Richmond or Norfolk. But they are both pretty far away from Southampton. Why do you ask?”

“I want to write about Auschwitz,” she said, “I want to write about my experiences there. I suppose I could write in Polish or German or maybe French, but I’d so much rather be able to write in English...”

Auschwitz. It was a place which, amid the events of the past few days, I had thrust so far in the back of my mind that I had almost forgotten its existence; now it returned like a blow at the back of my skull, and it hurt. I looked at Sophie as she took a swig from her cup and then gave a small burp. Her speech had taken on the swollen-tongued quality which I had learned was a presentiment of unruly thinking and difficult behavior. I longed to dump that cup on the floor. And I cursed myself for the weakness or indecisiveness or spinelessness, or whatever it was, that still prevented my dealing more firmly with Sophie at such moments. Wait until we’re married, I thought.

“There are so many things that people still don’t know about that place!” she said fiercely. “There are so many things I haven’t even told
you,
Stingo, and I’ve told you so much. You know, about how the whole place was covered with the smell of burning Jews, day and night. I’ve told you that. But I never even told you hardly anything about Birkenau, when they begun to starve me to death and I got so sick I almost died. Or about the time I saw a guard take the clothes off a nun and then make his dog attack her and bite her so bad on the body and the face that she died a few hours later. Or...” And here she paused, gazed into space, then said, “There are so many terrible things I could tell. But maybe I could write it as a novel, you see, if I learned to write English good, and then I could make people understood how the Nazis made you do things you never believed you could. Like Höss, for instance. I never would have tried to make him fuck me if it hadn’t been for Jan. And I never would have pretended that I hated Jews so much, or that I wrote my father’s pamphlet. All that was for Jan. And that radio that I didn’t take. It still almost kills me that I didn’t steal it, but don’t you see, Stingo, how that would have ruined everything for my little boy? And at that same time I just couldn’t open my mouth, just couldn’t report to the Resistance people, couldn’t say a word about all the things I’d learned working for Höss, because I was afraid...” She faltered. Her hands were trembling. “I was
so
afraid! They made me afraid of everything! Why don’t I tell the truth about myself? Why don’t I write it down in a book that I was a terrible coward, that I was a filthy
collaboratrice,
that I done everything that was bad just to save myself?” She made a savage moan, so loud above the racket of the train that heads turned nearby and eyes rolled. “Oh, Stingo, I can’t stand living with these things!”