Sophie's Choice (51 page)

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 lovecrazed 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 coffinmakers--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--" Now again she interrupted, saying gently but probingly, " 'Once we get settled'? What's going to happen then? How do you mean 'get settled,' Stingo dear?" There was a huge and troubling vacuum created by this question which I could not possibly fill with an immediate answer, so freighted with ponderous meaning did I realize that the answer now had to be, and I gave a sort of foolish gulp and was silent for a long moment, aware of the blood flowing in rapid arrhythmic pulse at my temples, and of the desolate tomblike quietude of that shabby little room. Finally I said slowly, but with more ease and boldness than I thought I could ever muster, "Sophie, I'm in love with you. I want to marry you. I want us to live down on that farm together. I want to write my books there, maybe for the rest of my life, and I want you to be there with me and help me and raise a family." I hesitated for an instant, then said, "I need you very much. So very, very much. Is it too much to hope that you need me too?" Even as I pronounced these words I was aware that they had the exact timbre and quavering resonance of a proposal I had once seen and heard George Brent, of all the solemn assholes, make to Olivia de Havilland on the promenade deck of some preposterous Hollywood ocean liner, but having said what I had to say so decisively, I let the bathos pass, thinking in a flash that perhaps all first protestations of love had to sound like movie crud. Sophie put her head down next to mine so that I felt her faintly fevered cheek, and she spoke into my year with a muffled voice while I watched her silk-clad hips swaying lightly above me. "Oh, sweet Stingo, you're such a love. You've taken care of me in so many ways. I don't know what I'd do without you." A pause, her lips brushing my neck. "Do you know something, Stingo, I'm beyond thirty. What would you do with an old lady like me?" "I'd manage," I said. "I'd manage somehow." "You would want someone closer to your age to have children with, not someone like me. Besides..." She fell silent. "Besides what?" "Well, the doctors have said I must be very careful about having children after..." There was another silence. "You mean after what you went through?" "Yes. But it's not just that. Someday I'll just be old and ugly and you'll still be quite young and I won't blame you if you go chasing after all the young and pretty mademoiselles." "Oh, Sophie, Sophie," I protested in a whisper, thinking despairingly: She hasn't said "I love you" in return. "Don't talk like that. You'll always be my--well, my..." I groped for a phrase that was properly tender, could say only, "Number One." It sounded hopelessly banal. She sat erect again. "I do want to go with you to this farm. I so much want to see the South after all you've said and after reading Faulkner. Why don't we just go to this place for a little while and I could stay with you without us being married, and we could decide--" "Sophie, Sophie," I put in, "I'd love that. There's nothing I'd like better. I'm not a maniac for marriage. But you don't realize what kind of people live down there. I mean, they're decent, generous, good-hearted Southern folks, but in a little country place like we'd be living in, it would be impossible not to be married. Jesus Christ, Sophie, it's full of Christians! Once it got around that we were living in sin, as it's called, those good Virginia people would cover us with tar and feathers and tie us to a long two-by-four and dump us over the Carolina line. God's truth, that's what would happen." Sophie gave a small giggle. "Americans are so funny. I thought Poland was so very puritanical, but imagine..." I realize now that it was the siren, or choir of sirens, and the drumming pandemonium that accompanied their shrieks, that ruptured the fragile membrane of Sophie's mood, which thanks in part to my own attentive ministrations had become peaceful, even luminous around the edges, if hardly sunny. City sirens even at a distance generate a hateful noise, almost always set loose in a soul-damaging, unnecessary frenzy. This one, rising from the narrow street only three floors directly below us, was amplified as if by canyon walls, bouncing from the grimy building opposite and entering the window next to us like an elongated snout, a solidified scream. It maddened the eardrum, pure sadistic torment made aural, and I jumped from the bed to pull the window down. At the end of the dark street a smudge of smoke plumed away from what looked like a warehouse, but the fire trucks just below, stalled by some nameless impediment, kept releasing skyward their unbelievable blasts. I slammed down the window, which was of some relief, but it appeared not to have helped Sophie at all; she lay sprawled on the bed kicking her heels and with a pillow jammed down over her head. Recent city dwellers, we were both used to this common enough intrusion, but rarely so loud or so close. The pokey town of Washington had produced a racket I had never heard in New York. But slowly now the fire engines moved past their obstruction, the noise diminished, and I turned my attention to Sophie on the bed. She looked up at me. Where the horrible clamor had merely set my nerves ajangle, it had plainly lacerated her like some evil bullwhip. Her face was pink and contorted and she rolled over toward the wall, shuddering and once more in tears. I sat down beside her. I watched in silence for a long minute or so until finally her sobs gradually ceased and I heard her say, "I'm so sorry, Stingo. I don't seem to be able to control myself." "You're doing fine," I said without much conviction. For a while she was completely silent where she lay, contemplating the wall. At last she said, "Stingo, did you ever have dreams in your life that came back over and over again? Isn't it called recurring dreams?" "Yes," I replied, recalling the dream I had as a young boy after my mother's death--her open coffin in the garden, her rain-damp ravaged face gazing at me in agony. "Yes," I said again, "I had one that came back constantly after my mother died." "Do you think they have to do with parents? The one I've had all my life is about my father." "It's strange," I said. "Maybe. I don't know. Mothers and fathers--they're at the core of one's own life somehow. Or they can be." "When I was asleep a while ago I had this dream about my father that I've had many times. But I must have forgotten it when I woke up. Then that fire engine just now--that siren. It was awful but it had a strange musical sound. Could that be it--the music? It shocked me and made me think of the dream again." "What was it about?" "You see, it has to do with something that happened to me when I was a child." "What was that, Sophie?" "Well, first you would have to understand something, before the dream. It was when I was eleven, like you. It was in the summer when we spent vacations in the Dolomites, like I've already told you. You remember I told you my father each summer rented a chalet there above Bolzano--in a little village called Oberbozen, which was German-speaking, of course. There was a small colony of Polish people there, professors from Cracow and Warsaw and some Polish--well, I suppose you would call them Polish aristocrats, at least they had money. I remember one of the professors was the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. My father tried to cultivate Malinowski, but Malinowski detested my father. Once, in Cracow, I overheard a grownup say that Professor Malinowski thought my father, Professor Biegañski, was a parvenu and hopelessly vulgar. Anyway, there was a rich Polish woman at Oberbozen named Princess Czartoryska, whom my father had come to know well, and he saw quite a bit of her during these summers. She was from a very old, very noble Polish family and my father liked her because she was rich and, well, she shared his feelings about Jews. "This was the time of Pilsudski, you see, when the Polish Jews were protected and having, I guess you would call, a fairly decent life, and my father and Princess Czartoryska would get together and talk about the Jewish problem and the necessity of getting rid of the Jews someday. It is strange, you know, Stingo, because my father when he was in Cracow was always discreet about talking about Jews and his hatred of them in