William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (277 page)

“Hush, Sophie!” I commanded. “You
know
you weren’t a collaborator. You’re contradicting yourself! You know you were just a
victim.
You told me yourself this summer that a place like that camp made you behave in a different way than in the ordinary world. You told me yourself that you just couldn’t judge what you did or what anyone else did in terms of accepted conduct. So please, Sophie, please,
please
leave yourself alone! You’re just eating your guts out about things that weren’t your fault—and it’s going to make you
ill!
Please stop it.” I lowered my voice, and I used a word of endearment I had never used before, the word itself surprising me. “Please stop this now, darling, for your own sake.” It sounded pompous with the “darling”—already I was talking in a husbandly way—but I somehow had to say it.

I was also on the verge of speaking those words which had been on my tongue a hundred times that summer—“I love you, Sophie.” The prospect of uttering that plain phrase made my heart pound and skip beats, but before I could open my mouth Sophie announced that she had to go to the bathroom. She finished off the cup before she went. I watched anxiously as she began to shove her way toward the rear of the car, the blond head bobbing, the pretty legs unsteady. Then I turned back to reading
Life
magazine. I must have dozed off then, or rather, slept, sunk as if drowned after the exhaustion of a wide-awake night and its tension and chaos, for when the conductor’s nearby voice woke me by bellowing “All aboard!” I jumped straight up out of my seat and then realized that an hour or more had passed. Sophie had not returned to her place next to me, and sudden fear wrapped itself around me like a quilt fashioned of many wet hands. I glanced into the darkness outside, saw the passing sparkle of tunnel lights, and knew that we were leaving Baltimore. It might have been a normal two-minute struggle to the other end of the car, pressing and shoving past the bellies and rumps of fifty standees, but I made it in a few seconds, actually knocking a small child down. In senseless dread I pounded at the door of the women’s lavatory—what made me think she was still in there? A fat Negro woman with wild wiglike hair and bright marigold powder on her jowls stuck her face out and shrilled, “Git outa here! You crazy?” I plunged on.

In the swanker regions of the train I was enveloped by moist Muzak. The elderly-auntie strains of Percy Grainger’s
Country Gardens
followed me as I frantically peered into roomette after roomette, hoping that Sophie had strayed into one and perhaps gone to sleep. I was now alternately obsessed by the notion that she had gotten off in Baltimore and that—Oh shit, the other was even more unthinkable. I opened the doors of more lavatories, stalked the funereal plush reaches of four or five parlor cars, hopefully scanned the diner where white-aproned colored waiters flapped their way up and down the aisle through fumes fragrant with stale cooking oil. At last: the club car. A little desk, a cash register—its custodian a pleasant gray-haired middle-aged woman who gazed up from her work with mournful eyes.

“Yes, poor dear,” she said after I had blurted the queasy question, “she was hunting for a telephone. Imagine, on a train! She wanted to call Brooklyn. Poor dear, she was crying. She seemed, well, a little drunk. She went that way.”

I found Sophie at the end of the car, which was a bleak cage of a vestibule, clangingly noisy, that was also the end of the train. A padlocked glass door crisscrossed by wire mesh looked down on the receding rails that glittered in the late-morning sun and converged at a point marking infinity amid the green pinewoods of Maryland. She was sitting on the floor slumped against the wall, her yellow hair adrift in the windy draft, and in one hand she clutched the bottle. As in that swim to oblivion weeks before—when exhaustion had so unmanned her, and guilt, and grief—she had gone as far as she could go. She gazed up and said something to me, but I couldn’t hear. I bent down closer, and now—partly reading her lips, partly responding to that infinitely sorrowful voice—heard her say, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

Hotel employees certainly must come face to face with a lot of weird ones. But I still wonder what went through the mind of the grandfatherly desk clerk at the Hotel Congress, not far from our nation’s Capitol, when he confronted the young Reverend Wilbur Entwistle, wearing a distinctly unecclesiastical seersucker suit but conspicuously carrying a Bible, and his violently rumpled fair-haired wife, who muttered disconnectedly in a foreign accent during the registration process, her face potty with train soot and tears, and clearly blotto. In the end he doubtless took it in his stride, for I had worked out a camouflage. Despite my informal dress, the masquerade I had contrived seemed as effective as one could imagine. In the 1940s unmarried people were not permitted to check into the same hotel room together; in addition, it was a felonious risk to falsely register as man and wife. The hazard increased if the lady was drunk. Desperate, I knew I was taking a risk, but it was one that seemed minimized if I could cast over it a modest halo of sanctimony. Therefore, there was the black leather Bible which I fished out of my suitcase just before the train pulled into Union Station, and also there was the address I inscribed in a large hand on the register, as if to decisively validate my dulcet-voiced and unguentary ministerial bearing: Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. I was relieved to see that my ruse served to distract the clerk’s attention from Sophie; the dewlapped old gentleman, being Southern (like so many Washington hirelings), was impressed by my credentials and also had a Southerner’s genial garrulousness: “Have a nice stay, Reverend, you and the missus. What denomination you a preacher in?”

I was about to reply “Presbyterian,” but he had begun to ramble on like a beagle hound softly barking down the ravines of godly fellowship. “Me, I’m a Baptist, fifteen years I’ve attended the Second Baptist Church of Washington, mighty fine preacher we’ve got there now, Reverend Wilcox, maybe you’ve heard of him. Comes from Fluvanna County, Virginia, where I was born and raised, though of course he’s a much younger man.” As I began to edge away, with Sophie clinging heavily to my arm, the clerk rang for the single sleepy Negro bellboy and handed me a card. “You like good seafood, Reverend? Try this restaurant down on the waterfront. It’s called Herzog’s. Best crab cakes in town.” And when we approached the aged elevator with its stained pea-green doors, he persisted: “Entwistle. You wouldn’t be related to the Entwistles down around Powhatan County, would you, Reverend?” I was back in the South.

The Hotel Congress breathed an air of
troisième classe.
The cubbyhole of a room we took for seven dollars was drab and stifling, and its exposure on a nondescript back street let in feeble light from the midday sun. Sophie, wobbling and desperate for sleep, plunged onto the bed even before the bellboy had deposited our bags on a rickety stand and accepted my twenty-five cents. I opened a window upon a ledge calcimine with pigeon droppings, and a warm October breeze suddenly freshened the room. Far off I could hear the clangor and muffled hoots of the trains at Union Station, while from some nearer source there came ruffles and flourishes, trumpets, cymbals, the piping self-esteem of a military band. A couple of flies made a bloated buzzing in the shadows near the ceiling.

I lay down next to Sophie on the bed, which had become unsprung in the middle, not so much allowing me as forcing me to roll toward her, as in the bosom of some shallow hammock, and on top of threadbare bedclothes that exuded a faint musky chlorinated smell either of laundry bleach or semen, perhaps both. Almost total exhaustion and worry over Sophie’s condition had dampened the cruder urgencies of the desire I had continually felt for her, but the fragrance and slope of the bed—seminal, erotic, sagging with ten thousand fornications—and her simple touch and proximity made me stir, squirm, fidget, unable to sleep. I heard a distant bell chime the noon hour. Sophie slept against me with lips apart, her breath faintly odorous of whiskey. The low-cut silk dress she wore had allowed most of one breast to become exposed, causing me such an irresistible hunger to touch it that I did just that, stroking the blue-veined skin at first lightly with my fingertips, then beginning to press and fondle the creamy fullness more elaborately with palm and thumb. The seizure of pure lust which accompanied this tender manipulation was accompanied in turn by a twinge of shame; there was something sneaky, almost necrophiliac in the act; molesting even the epidermal surface of Sophie in the privacy of her drugged slumber—and so I stopped, withdrew my hand.

Still I could not sleep. My brain swam with images, sounds, voices, the past and the future trading places, sometimes commingled: Nathan’s howl of rage, so cruel and mad that I had to thrust it from my thoughts; recently written scenes from my novel, the characters babbling their dialogue in my ear like actors on a stage; my father’s voice on the telephone, generous, welcoming (was the old man not right? shouldn’t I now make the South forever my home?); Sophie on the mossy shore of some imaginary pond or pool deep within the woods beyond “Five Elms’ ” spring fields, her lithe restored body glorious and long-legged in a Lastex bathing suit, our grinning elf of a first-born perched on her knee; that hideous gunshot swarming in my ear; sunsets, abandoned love-crazed midnights, magnanimous dawns, vanished children, triumph, grief, Mozart, rain, September green, repose, death. Love. The distant band, fading away on the “Colonel Bogey March,” made me ache with a hungry nostalgia and I recalled the war years not so long before, when on leave from some camp in Carolina or Virginia, I would lie awake (womanless) in a hotel in this same city—one of the few American cities stalked by the revenants of history—and think of the streets below and how they must have looked only three-quarters of a century ago, in the midst of the most grief-blasted war that ever set brother to murdering brother, when the sidewalks teemed with soldiers in blue and with gamblers and whores, sharp swindlers in stovepipe hats, splashy Zouaves, hustling journalists, businessmen on the make, pretty flirts in flowered hats, shadowy Confederate spies, pickpockets and coffin-makers—these last ever-hurrying to their ceaseless labor, awaiting those tens of thousands of martyrs, mostly boys, who were being slaughtered on the desperate earth south of the Potomac and who lay piled up like cordwood thick in the bloody fields and woods just beyond that sleeping river. It was always strange to me—awesome even—that the cleanly modern capital of Washington, so impersonal and official in its expansive beauty, should be one of the few cities in the nation disturbed by authentic ghosts. The band vanished into the far distance, its brazen diminishing harmony soft, heartbreaking on my hearing like a lullaby. I slept.

When I awoke, Sophie was sitting crouched on the bed on her knees, looking down at me. I had slept like one in a coma, and I could tell from the alteration of light in the room—it had been like twilight even at noon but was now nearly dark—that several hours had passed. How long Sophie had been gazing down I could not tell, of course, but I had the uneasy feeling that it had been for quite a spell; the expression she wore was sweet, speculative, not without humor. There was the same wan haggardness in her face, and beneath her eyes there were dark patches, but she seemed revived and reasonably sober. She appeared to have recovered, at least for the moment, from that awful fit on the train. When I blinked up at her she said, in the exaggerated accent she sometimes affected in fun, “Well, Reverend En-
weestle,
deed you ’ave a good sleep?”

“Christ, Sophie,” I said in vague panic, “what time is it? I slept like a corpse.”

“I heard the bell ring in the church outside just now. I think it rang three o’clock.”

I stirred drowsily, stroking her arm. “We’ve got to move out, as they used to say in the service. We can’t hang around here all afternoon. I want you to see the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument. Also Ford’s Theatre, you know, where Lincoln was shot. And the Lincoln Memorial. There’s so many damned things. And we might think of getting a bite to eat...”

“I’m not at all hungry,” she replied. “But I do want to see the city. I feel so much better after that sleep.”

“You went out like a light,” I said.

“So did you. When I woke up, there you were with your mouth open, snoring.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, feeling a touch of real consternation. “I don’t snore. I’ve never snored in my life! No one ever told me that before.”

“It’s because you haven’t ever
slept
with anybody,” she retorted in a teasing voice. And then she bent down and glued upon my lips a wonderful moist rubbery kiss, replete with a surprising tongue which made a quick playful foray in my mouth, then vanished. She returned to her propped-up position above me before I could even begin to respond, though my heart had begun a runaway thudding. “God, Sophie,” I began, “don’t do that unless—” I reached up and wiped my lips.

“Stingo,” she interrupted me, “where are we going?”

A little puzzled, I said, “I just told you. We’re going out to see the Washington sights. We’ll go by the White House, we might even get a look at Harry Truman—“

“No, Stingo,” she put in, more seriously now, “I mean, where are we
really
going? Last night after Nathan—Well, last night after he done what he done and we were packing our bags so fast, all you kept saying was ‘We’ve got to get back home, back home!’ Over and over you said ‘Back home!’ And I just followed you like this because I was so scared, and here we are together in this strange city and I really don’t know why. Where are we truly going? What home?”

“Well, you know, Sophie, I told you. We’re going to that farm I told you about down in southern Virginia. There’s nothing much I can add to what I’ve already described to you about the place. It’s a peanut farm mainly. I’ve never seen it, but my father has said it’s very comfortable, with all the modern American conveniences. You know—washing machine, refrigerator, telephone, indoor plumbing, radio and everything. The works. After we get settled I’m sure we’ll be able to drive up to Richmond and invest in a fine phonograph and lots of records. All the music we both love. There’s a department store there called Miller and Rhoads that has an excellent record department, at least it did when I was going to school down in Middlesex—“