William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (275 page)

At Mrs. Zimmerman’s I paid that faithful mole Morris Fink fifty cents to help us cope with Sophie’s baggage. She was sobbing and, I could see, rather drunk as she tramped about her room stuffing clothes and cosmetics and jewelry into a large suitcase.

“My beautiful suits from Saks,” she mumbled. “Oh, what should I do with them?”

“Take them with you, for Christ’s sake,” I said impatiently, heaving her many pairs of shoes into another bag. “Forget protocol at a time like this. You’ve got to hurry. Nathan might be coming back.”

“And my lovely wedding dress? What shall I do with it?”

“Take it, too! If you can’t wear it, maybe you can hock it.”

“Hock?” she said.

“Pawn.”

I had not meant to be cruel, but my words caused Sophie to drop a silk slip to the floor and then raise her hands to her face, and bawl loudly, and shed helpless, glistening tears. Morris looked on morosely as I held her for a moment and uttered futile soothing sounds. It was dark outside and the roar of a truck horn along a nearby street made me jump, shredding my nerve endings like some evil hacksaw. To the general hubbub was added now the monstrous jangle of the telephone in the hallway, and I think I must have stifled a groan, or perhaps a scream. I became even further unstrung when Morris, having silenced the Gorgon by answering it, bellowed out the news that the call was for me.

It was Nathan. It was Nathan, all right. Plainly, unmistakably, unequivocally it was Nathan. Then why for an instant did my mind play an odd trick on me, so that I thought it was Jack Brown calling up from Rockland County to check on the situation? It was because of the Southern accent, that perfectly modulated mimicry which made me believe that the possessor of such a voice had to be one teethed on fatback and grits. It was as Southern as verbena or foot-washing Baptists or hound dogs or John C. Calhoun, and I think I even smiled when I heard it say, “What’s cookin’, sugah? How’s your hammer hangin’?”

“Nathan!” I exclaimed with contrived heartiness. “How are you?
Where
are you? God, it’s good to hear from you!”

“We still gonna take that trip down South? You and me an’ ol’ Sophie? Gonna do the Dixie tour?”

I knew that I had to humor him in some way, make small talk while trying at the same time to discover his whereabouts—a subtle matter—so I replied instantly, “You’re damn right we’re going to make that trip, Nathan. Sophie and I were just talking it over. God, those are sensational clothes you bought her! Where are you now, old pal? I’d love to come and see you. I want to tell you about this little side trip I’ve got planned—”

The voice broke in with its ingratiating molasses pokiness and warmth, still an uncanny replica of the speech of my Carolina forebears, lilting, lulling: “I’m sho’ lookin’ forward to that trip with you an’ Miz Sophie. We gonna have the time of our lives, ain’t we, ol’ buddy?”

“It’s going to be the best trip ever—” I began.

“We’ll have a lot of free time, too, won’t we?” he said.

“Sure, we’ll have a lot of free time,” I replied, not knowing quite what he meant. “All the time in the world, to do anything we want. It’s still warm in October down there. Swim. Fish. Sail a boat on Mobile Bay.”

“That’s what I want,” he drawled, “lots of free time. What I mean is, three people, they travel around a lot together, well, even when they are the
best
of friends, it might be a little
sticky
bein’ together every single minute. So I’d have free time to go off by myself every now an’ then, wouldn’t I? Just for an hour or two, maybe, down in Birmingham or Baton Rouge or someplace like that.” He paused and I heard a rich melodious chuckle. “An’ that would give
you
free time too, wouldn’t it? You might even have enough free time to get you a little nooky. A growin’ Southern boy’s got to have his poontang, don’t he?”

I began to laugh a trifle nervously, struck by the fact that in this weird conversation with its desperate undertone, at least on my part, we should already have foundered on the shoals of sex. But I willingly rose to Nathan’s bait, quite unaware of the savage hook he had fashioned for my precipitate capture. “Well, Nathan,” I said, “I do expect that here and there I’ll run into some good, ready stuff. Southern girls,” I added, thinking grimly of Mary Alice Grimball, “are tough to penetrate, if you’ll excuse the phrase, but once they decide to put out, they’re awfully sweet in the sack—”

“No, buddy,” he put in suddenly, “I don’t mean Southern nooky! What I mean is
Polack
nooky! What I mean is that when ol’ Nathan goes off to see Mr. Jeff Davis’s White House or the ol’ plantation where Scarlett O’Hara whupped all those niggers with her ridin’ crop—why, there’s ol’ Stingo back at the Green Magnolia Motel, and guess what he’s doin’? Just guess! Guess what ol’ Stingo’s up to with his best friend’s wife! Why, Stingo and her are in bed and he has actually
mounted
that tender
willing
little Polish piece an’ they jus’
fuckin’
their fool heads off! Hee hee!”

As he said these words I was aware that Sophie had drawn near, hovering at my elbow, murmuring something I could not comprehend—the incomprehensibility being partly due to the blood pounding at a hot gallop in my ears and perhaps also to the fact that, distracted and horrified, I could pay little attention to anything save for the incredible jellylike weakness in my knees and my fingers, which had begun to twitch out of control. “Nathan!” I said in a choked voice. “Good God—”

And then his voice, transmuted back into what I had always conceived as Educated High Brooklyn, became a snarl of such ferocity that even the myriad intervening and humming electronic synapses could not filter out the force of its crazed but human rage. “You unspeakable creep! You wretched swine! God damn you to hell forever for betraying me behind my back, you whom I trusted like the best friend I ever had! And that shit-eating grin of yours day after day cool as a cucumber, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it, when you gave me a piece of your manuscript to read—‘
ah gee, Nathan, thank you so much
—’ when not fifteen minutes earlier you’d been humping away in bed with the woman I was going to marry, I say was
going
to, past tense, because I’d burn in hell before I’d marry a two-timing Polack who’d spread her legs for a sneaky Southern shitass betraying me like...”

I removed the receiver from my ear and turned to Sophie, who, with mouth agape, had clearly divined what it was that Nathan had been raging about. “Oh God, Stingo,” I heard her whisper, “I didn’t want you to know that he kept saying it was
you
that I was...”

I listened again, in impotence and anguish: “I’m coming to get you both.” Then there was a moment’s silence, resonant, baffling. And I heard a metallic click. But I realized the line was not dead.

“Nathan,” I said.
“Please!
Where are you?”

“Not far away, old pal. In fact, I’m right around the corner. And I’m coming to get you treacherous scum. And then you know what I’m going to do? Do you know what I’m going to do to you two deceitful, unspeakable pigs? Listen—”

There was an explosion in my ear. Too diminished by the distance or by whatever in a phone mercifully deamplifies noise and prevents it from destroying human hearing, the impact of the gunshot stunned rather than hurt me yet nonetheless left a prolonged and desolate buzzing against my eardrum like the swarming of a thousand bees. I will never know whether Nathan fired that shot into the very mouth of the telephone he was holding, or into the air, or against some forlorn, anonymous wall, but it sounded close enough for him to be, as he had said, right around the corner, and I dropped the receiver in panic and, turning, clutched for Sophie’s hand. I had not heard a shot fired since the war, and I’m almost certain that I thought I would never hear another shot again. I pity my blind innocence. Now, after the passing of time in this bloody century, whenever there has occurred any of those unimaginable deeds of violence that have plundered our souls, my memory has turned back to Nathan—the poor lunatic whom I loved, high on drugs and with a smoking barrel in some nameless room or phone booth—and his image has always seemed to foreshadow these wretched unending years of madness, illusion, error, dream and strife. But at that moment I felt only unutterable fear. I looked at Sophie, and she looked at me, and we fled.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
the Pennsylvania train that Sophie and I were riding to Washington, D.C., on our way down to Virginia, suffered a power failure and stalled on the trestle opposite the Wheatena factory in Rahway, New Jersey. During this interruption in our trip—a stop which lasted only fifteen minutes or so—I subsided into a remarkable tranquillity and found myself taking hopeful stock of the future. It still amazes me that I was able to maintain this calm, this almost elegant repose, after our headlong escape from Nathan and the fretful, sleepless night Sophie and I spent in the bowels of Penn Station. My eyes were gritty with fatigue and a part of my mind still dwelt achingly on the catastrophe we had barely avoided. As time had worn on that night it seemed more and more probable to both Sophie and me that Nathan had not been in our vicinity when he made that telephone call; nonetheless his merciless threat had sent us running madly from the Pink Palace with only one large suitcase each to get us down to the farm in Southampton County. We agreed that we would worry about the rest of our belongings later. From that moment on we had both been possessed—and in a sense united—by a single-minded and terrible urge: to flee Nathan and get as far away from him as we could.

Even so, the spell of enervated composure which finally came over me on the train would scarcely have been possible had it not been for the first of two telephone calls I was finally able to complete from the station. This was to Larry, who understood immediately the desperate nature of his brother’s crisis and told me that he would leave Toronto without delay and come down and cope with Nathan in the best way he could. We wished each other luck and said we would keep in touch. So at least I felt I had discharged some final responsibility toward Nathan and had not exactly abandoned him in my scramble to get away; after all, I had been running for my life. The other call was to my father; he of course welcomed with joy my announcement that Sophie and I were on our way south. “You’ve made a splendid decision!” I heard him shout over the distant miles, with obvious emotion. “Leaving that no-good world!”

And so, sitting high above Rahway in the crowded coach with Sophie dozing beside me, munching on a stale Danish pastry bought from the candy butcher along with a lukewarm carton of milk, I began to regard the unfolding years ahead with equanimity and affection. Now that Nathan and Brooklyn were behind me, I was about to turn the page on a new chapter in my life. For one thing, I calculated that my book, which would be a longish one, was nearly one-third completed. By chance the work I had done on it at Jack Brown’s house had brought me to a congenial way station in the narrative, a place where I felt it would be easy to pick up the loose ends once I got settled with Sophie down on the farm. After a week or so of adjusting to our new rural surroundings—getting to know the Negro help, stocking the larder, meeting the neighbors, learning to run the old beat-up truck and tractor which my father had told me came with the place—I would be in a fine way to resume advancing the story, and with honest application I might be lucky enough to have the whole thing wrapped up and ready to hawk to a publisher by the end of 1948.

I looked down at Sophie as I thought these buoyant thoughts. She was fast asleep, her tousled blond head lay against my shoulder, and I very gently surrounded her with my arm, lightly touching her hair with my lips as I did so. A vagrant pang of memory stabbed me but I thrust the ache aside; certainly I could not be a homosexual, could I, feeling for this creature such abiding, heartbreaking desire? We would of course have to get married, once established in Virginia; the ethos of the time and place would certainly permit no casual cohabitation. But despite the nagging problems, which included eradicating the memory of Nathan and the difference in our ages, I had the feeling that Sophie would be willing, and I resolved to nibble around the edges of this proposition with her once she woke up. She stirred and murmured something in her slumber, looking even in her haggard exhaustion so lovely that I wanted to weep. My God, I thought, this woman is soon likely to be my wife.

The train gave a lurch, moved forward, faltered, stopped again, and a low concerted groan went through the car. A sailor standing above me in the aisle swilled at a can of beer. A baby began to squall with hellish abandon behind me, and it occurred to me that in public conveyances fate inevitably positioned the single screaming infant in the seat nearest my own. I hugged Sophie softly and thought of my book; a thrill of pride and contentment went through me when I considered the honest workmanship I had so far put into the story, making its predestined way with grace and beauty toward the blazing denouement which remained to be set down but which I had already foretokened in my mind a thousand times: the tormented, alienated girl going to her lonely death on the indifferent summertime streets of the city I had just left behind. I had a moment of gloom: Would I be able to summon the passion, the insight to portray this young suicide? Could I make it all seem
real
? I was sorely bothered by the approaching struggle of
imagining
the girl’s ordeal. Nonetheless I felt so serenely secure in the integrity of this novel that I had already fashioned for it an appropriately melancholy title:
Inheritance of Night.
This from the
Requiescat
of Matthew Arnold, an elegy for a woman’s spirit, with its concluding line: “Tonight it doth inherit the vasty hall of Death.” How could a book like this fail to capture the souls of thousands of readers? Gazing out at the grime-encrusted façade of the Wheatena factory—hulking, homely, its blue industrial windows reflecting the morning light—I shivered with happiness and again with pride at the sheer
quality
of what I had put into my book by dint of so much solitary work and perspiration and, yes, even occasional freshets of grief; and thinking once more of the as yet unwritten climax, I allowed myself to fantasize a line from the review of a dazzled critic of 1949 or 1950: “The most powerful passage of female interior monologue since Molly Bloom’s.” What folly! I thought. What conceit!