William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (286 page)

I replied, “Amen,” opening my Bible to the exact middle of its pages where, I remembered from idiot Sunday School lessons, I would discover the Psalms of David. “Amen,” I said again.
As the hart panteth after the water brooks so panteth my soul after thee, O God
...
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.
Suddenly I felt I had to be secreted from all human eyes. Lurching to the washroom, I locked myself in and sat on the can, scrawling in my notebook apocalyptic messages to myself whose content I barely understood even as they streamed out from my scrambled consciousness: last bulletins of a condemned man, or the ravings of one who, perishing on the earth’s most remote and rotted strand, floats crazed jottings in bottles out upon the black indifferent bosom of eternity. “Why you cryin’, sonny?” said the woman later when I slumped down beside her. “Somebody done hurt you bad?” I could say nothing in reply, but then she made a suggestion, and after a bit I mustered enough possession to read in unison with her, so that our voices rose in a harmonious and urgent threnody above the clatter of the train. “Psalm Eighty-eight,” I would suggest. To which she would reply, “Dat is some fine psalm.”
O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles
... We read aloud through Wilmington, Chester and past Trenton, turning from time to time to Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. After a while we tried the Sermon on the Mount, but somehow it didn’t work for me; the grand old Hebrew woe seemed more cathartic, so we went back to Job. When at last I raised my eyes and looked outside, it had grown dark and lightning in green sheets heaved up over the western horizon. The dark priestess, whom I had grown attached to, if not to love, got off in Newark. “Ev’ything gone be all right,” she predicted.

That night the Pink Palace from the outside looked like the set of one of those glossy, brutal detective movies I had seen a hundred times. To this day I remember so plainly my feeling of acceptance when I made my way up the sidewalk—my willingness not to be surprised. All the avatars of death were there as I had prefigured them: ambulances, fire engines, emergency vans, police cars with pulsing red lights—these in gross excess of need, as if the poor ramshackle house had harbored some terrible massacre instead of two people who had willed themselves into an almost decorous ending, going off silently to sleep. A floodlight enveloped all in its acetylene glare, there was one of those grim barricades with its cardboard sign—Do Not Cross—and everywhere stood clots of thuggish policemen chewing gum and negligently swatting their thick behinds. I argued with one of these cops—a choleric ugly Irishman—asserting my right to enter, and I might have remained outside for hours had it not been for Larry. He spied me and spoke brusquely to the meat-faced brute, whereupon I was allowed to go into the downstairs hallway. In my own room, with its door ajar, Yetta Zimmerman half lay, half sat sprawled in a chair, muttering distractedly in Yiddish. Plainly, she had just been informed of the happenings; her wide homely face, usually such an image of fine humor, was bloodless, had the vacant stare of shock. An ambulance attendant hovered near her, ready to administer a syringe. Saying nothing, Larry led me upstairs past a cluster of wormy-looking police reporters and two or three photographers who seemed to respond to any moving object by exploding flashbulbs. Cigarette smoke hung so thickly over the landing that for an instant I thought the place might have earlier been on fire. Near the entrance to Sophie’s room Morris Fink, even more drained of color than Yetta and looking genuinely bereft, spoke in trembling tones to a detective. I stopped long enough for a word with Morris. He told me a little about the afternoon, the music. And finally there was the room, glowing in coralline softness beyond the battered-down door.

I blinked in the dim light, then gradually caught sight of Sophie and Nathan where they lay on top of the bright apricot bedspread. They were clad as on that long-ago Sunday when I first saw them together—she in her sporty togs from a bygone time, he in those wide-striped, raffish, anachronistic gray flannels that had made him look like a successful gambler. Dressed thus, but recumbent and entwined in each other’s arms, they appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely whisper to each other of fond matters, and were frozen in this grave and tender embrace forever.

“I wouldn’t look at their faces, if I were you,” said Larry. Then after a pause he added, “But they didn’t suffer. It was sodium cyanide. It was over in a few seconds.”

To my shame and chagrin I felt my knees buckle and I nearly fell, but Larry grabbed and held me. Then I recovered and stepped through the door.

“Who’s this, Doctor?” said a policeman, moving to block my way.

“Member of the family,” Larry said, speaking the truth. “Let him in.”

There was nothing much in the room to add to, or subtract from, or explain the dead couple on the bed. I couldn’t bear to look at them any longer. For some reason I edged toward the phonograph, which had shut itself off, and glanced at the stack of records that Sophie and Nathan had played that afternoon. Purcell’s
Trumpet Voluntary,
the Haydn cello concerto, part of the Pastoral Symphony, the lament for Eurydice from Gluck’s
Orfeo
—these were among the dozen or so of the shellac records I removed from the spindle. There were also two compositions whose titles had particular meaning for me, if only because of the meaning I knew they had possessed for Sophie and Nathan. One was the larghetto from the B-flat major piano concerto of Mozart—the last he wrote—and I had been with Sophie many times when she played it, stretched out on the bed with one arm flung over her eyes as the slow, sweet, tragic measures flooded the room. He was so close to the end of his life when he wrote it; was that the reason (I remember her wondering aloud) why the music was filled with a resignation that was almost like joy? If she had ever been fortunate enough to have become a pianist, she went on, this would have been one of the first pieces she would have wished to commit to memory, mastering every shading of what she felt was its sound of “forever.” I knew almost nothing of Sophie’s history then, nor could I fully appreciate what, after a pause, she said about the piece: that she never heard it without thinking of children playing in the dusk, calling out in far, piping voices while the shadows of nightfall swooped down across some green and tranquil lawn.

Two white-jacketed morgue attendants entered the room with a rustle of plastic bags. The other piece of music was one that both Sophie and Nathan had listened to all summer long. I don’t want to give it a larger connotation than it deserves, for Sophie and Nathan had fled faith. But the record had been on the top of the stack, and I could not help making this instinctive conjecture as I replaced it, assuming that in their final anguish—or ecstasy, or whatever engulfing revelation may have united them just before the darkness—the sound they heard was
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

These final entries should be called, I suppose, something like “A Study in the Conquest of Grief.”

We buried Sophie and Nathan side by side in a cemetery in Nassau County. It was less difficult to get organized than one might have imagined. Because there had been worries. After all, a Jew and a Catholic in a “suicide pact” (as the
Daily News
termed it, in a garishly illustrated story on page three), unmarried lovers dwelling in sin, suggestive beauty and good looks, the instigator of the tragedy a young man with a history of psychotic episodes, and so on—this was the stuff of superscandal in the year 1947. One could envision all sorts of objections to a double burial. But the ceremony was relatively easy to arrange (and Larry arranged it all) because there were no strict religious injunctions to observe. Nathan and Larry’s parents had been Orthodox Jews, but the mother was dead and the father, now in his eighties, was in precarious health and quite senile. Furthermore—and why not face it? we said—Sophie had no closer relative than Nathan. These considerations made it all the more reasonable for Larry to settle on the rites that were held that following Monday. Neither Larry nor Nathan had been inside a synagogue for years. And I told Larry, when he asked my advice, that I thought Sophie would not have wanted a priest or any ministrations of her church—perhaps a blasphemous assumption, and one that consigned Sophie to hell, but I was certain (and still am) that I was correct. In the afterlife Sophie would be able to endure any hell.

So at a downtown outpost of Walter B. Cooke we had obsequies that were as civilized and decent as were possible under the circumstances, with their accompanying whiff (to the public that goggled outside, at least) of dirty and fatal passion. We were to have a little trouble regarding the officiating divine; he was a disaster, but I was happily unaware of this as I stood with Larry that afternoon, greeting the mourners. There was only a small group of these. The first to arrive was the older Landau sister, married to a surgeon. She had flown from St. Louis with her teen-age son. The two expensively dressed chiropractors, Blackstock and Katz, came with a couple of youngish women who had worked with Sophie in the office; they were weeping blindly and had drawn faces and pink noses. Yetta Zimmerman, teetering on prostration, arrived with Morris Fink and the fat rabbinical student Moishe Muskatblit, who was helping to support Yetta but who from his drained, wheylike face and uncertain gait looked in need of support himself.

A handful of Nathan and Sophie’s friends turned up—six or seven of the young professionals and teachers at Brooklyn College who comprised what I had called the “Morty Haber group,” including Morty himself. He was a soft-spoken, gentle scholar. I had come to know him slightly and like him, and I attached myself to him for a while that day. There was a top-heavy, almost overpowering air of solemnity to the occasion, with not even a breath of the fugitive facetiousness that some deaths permit: the hush and the strained, miserable masks bespoke an awareness of real shock, real tragedy. No one had bothered to consult about the music, and this was both an irony and a shame. As the mourners trouped into the vestibule to the popping of flashbulbs I could hear a whiny Hammond organ playing Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” Reflecting on Sophie’s—and for that matter, Nathan’s—loving and noble response to music, that peevish, vulgar utterance made my stomach turn over.

My stomach was in poor enough shape anyway, also my general equilibrium. After the train ride up from Washington, I had experienced hardly a moment’s sobriety or a moment’s sleep. I had been left a pacing, driven, gritty-eyed insomniac by what had happened; and since sleep would not come, I had filled the unholy hours—in which I had skulked about the streets and into the bars of Flatbush, murmuring “Why, why, why?”—with obsessive guzzling, mostly beer, which kept me marginally but not completely drunk. I was half drunk and undergoing the queerest sense of dislocation and exhaustion (prelude to what might have been true alcoholic hallucinosis, I later realized) I had ever felt when I sank into one of Walter B. Cooke’s commercial pews and listened to Reverend DeWitt “sermonize” above Nathan’s and Sophie’s coffins. It was not really Larry’s fault about the Reverend DeWitt. He felt that he needed a clergyman of some kind, but a rabbi seemed inappropriate, a priest unacceptable—so a friend of his, or a friend of a friend, suggested Reverend DeWitt. He was a Universalist, a man in his forties, with a synthetically serene face, wavy blond, carefully groomed hair and pinkly mobile, rather girlish lips. He wore a tan business suit with a tan vest tucked around his nascent paunch, upon which glittered the golden key of Omicron Delta Kappa, the college leadership fraternity.

I made then my first half-dotty, audible chuckle, causing a small stir among the people nearest me. I had never seen that key worn by anyone much over my own age, especially beyond the bounds of a campus, and it added a further touch of ludicrousness to a person I already had detested on sight. And how Nathan would have howled at this watery newt of a
goy!
Slouched down next to Morty Haber in the gloom, inhaling the syrupy fragrance of calla lilies, I decided that the Reverend DeWitt, more than any person I had ever encountered, summoned up in me all my homicidal potential. He droned on insultingly, invoking Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dale Carnegie, Spinoza, Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud. He mentioned Christ once, in rather distant terms—not that I minded. I sank lower and lower in my stall, and began to tune him out as one cancels sound with the dial of a radio, allowing my mind to capture drowsily only the plumpest and moistest platitudes. These lost children. Victims of an age of rampant materialism. Loss of universal values. Failure of the old-fashioned principles of self-reliance.
Inability to intercommunicate!

“What fucking bullshit!”
I thought, then realized that I had spoken the words aloud, for I felt Morty Haber’s hand tap my leg and heard his gentle “Shh-h!” which mingled with a half-stifled laugh to make it plain that he agreed with me. I must have nodded off then—not into sleep but into some cataleptic realm where all thoughts scamper away like truants from the brain—because my next sensation was the horrible sight of the two gun-metal coffins being wheeled up the aisle past me on their sparkling trolleys.

“I think I’m going to vomit,” I said, too loud.

“Shh-h,”
said Morty.

Before embarking for the cemetery in the limousine, I slipped into a nearby bar and bought a large cardboard container of beer. One could obtain a quart for thirty-five cents in those days. I was aware of my probable tactlessness, but no one seemed to mind, and I was quite stiff by the time we got to the burial ground just beyond Hempstead. Oddly enough, Sophie and Nathan were among the very first to occupy space in this brand-new necropolis. Under the warm October sun the huge acreage of virgin greensward stretched to the horizon. As our procession wound its way to the distant grave site I feared that my two beloveds were going to be interred in a golf course. For an instant the notion was quite real. I had fallen into a spell of upside-down fantasy or psychic legerdemain that drunks are sometimes seized by: I saw generation after generation of golfers teeing off from Sophie and Nathan’s plot, shouting “Fore!” and busying themselves with their midirons and drivers while the departed souls stirred unquietly beneath the vibrating turf.