William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (278 page)

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 ear 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 Biega
ń
ski, 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 front of me or my mother or anyone like that. At least when I was a child. But in Italy, you see, at Oberbozen with Princess Czartoryska it was different. She was an eighty-year-old woman who always wore fine long gowns even in the middle of the summer, and wore jewelry—she had an immense emerald brooch, I remember—and she and my father would have tea in her very elegant
Sennhütte,
chalet, that is, and talk about the Jews. They always spoke in German. She had a beautiful Bernese mountain dog and I would play with the dog and overhear their conversation, almost always about the Jews. About sending them off somewhere, all of them, getting rid of them. The Princess even wanted to establish a fund for it. They were always talking about islands—Ceylon and Sumatra and Cuba but mostly Madagascar, where they would send the Jews. I would half listen while I played some game with Princess Czartoryska’s little grandson, who was English, or played with the big dog or listened to the music on this phonograph. It was the music, you see, Stingo, that has to do with my dream.”

Sophie fell silent again, and she pressed her fingers against her closed eyes. Something quickened in the monotone of her voice. She turned to me, as if she had become diverted from her remembrance. “We
will
have music where we’re going, then, Stingo. I wouldn’t be able to last long without music.”

“Well, I’ll be honest, Sophie. Out in the sticks—outside New York, that is—there’s nothing on the radio. No WQXR, no WNYC. Only Milton Cross and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. The rest is hillbilly. Some of it’s terrific. Maybe I’ll make you a Roy Acuff fan. But like I say, the first thing we’ll do after we move in is to buy a record player and records—”

“I’ve been so spoiled,” she put in, “after all the music Nathan bought me. But it’s my blood, my life’s blood, you know, and I can’t help it.” She paused, once again collecting the strands of her memory. Then she said, “Princess Czartoryska had a phonograph. It was one of those early machines, not very good, but it was the first one I had ever seen or heard. Strange, isn’t it, this old Polish Jew-hater with her love of music. She had a lot of records and it almost drove me mad with pleasure when she’d put them on for our benefit—my mother and my father and me and maybe some other guests—and we’d listen to these recordings. Most of them were arias from Italian and French operas—Verdi and Rossini and Gounod—but there was one record that I remember just made me nearly swoon, I loved it so. It must have been a rare and precious record. It’s hard to believe now, because it was very old and filled with noise, but I just adored it. It was Madame Schumann-Heink singing Brahms
Lieder.
On one side there was ‘Der Schmied,’ I remember, and on the other was ‘Von ewige Liebe,’ and when I first heard it I sat there in a trance listening to that wonderful voice coming through all those scratches, thinking all the while that it was the most gorgeous singing I had ever heard, that it was an angel come down to earth. Strange, I heard those two songs only once during all the times I went with my father to visit the Princess. I longed to hear them again. Oh God, I felt I would do almost anything—do something very naughty, even—to hear them once more, and I was just so hungry to ask that they be played again, but I was too shy, and besides, my father would have punished me if I had ever been so... so bold...

“So in the dream that has returned to me over and over I see Princess Czartoryska in her handsome gown go to the phonograph and she turns and always says, as if she were talking to me, ‘Would you like to hear the Brahms
Lieder
?’ And I always try to say yes. But just before I can say anything my father interrupts. He is standing next to the Princess and he is looking directly at me, and he says, ‘Please don’t play that music for the child. She is much too stupid to understand.’ And then I wake up with this pain... Only this time it was even worse, Stingo. Because in the dream I had just now he seemed to be talking to the Princess not about the music but about...” Sophie hesitated, then murmured, “About my death. He wanted me to die, I think.”

I turned away from Sophie. I walked the few steps to the window, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that was like a deep, twisting, visceral pain. A faint and bitter odor of combustion had seeped into the room, but despite this I opened the window and saw where smoke drifted down the street in fragile bluish veils. In the distance over the burning building a cloud rose in dingy turbulence but I saw no flame. The stench, growing stronger, was of scorched paint or tar or varnish mingled with hot rubber. More sirens sounded, but this time dimly, from the opposite direction, and I glimpsed a plume of water that gushed skyward toward hidden windows, met some hidden inferno and then evaporated in a nimbus of steam. Along the sidewalks below gawkers in shirt sleeves sidled tentatively toward the fire, and I saw two policemen begin to block the street with wooden barricades. There was no threat to the hotel, or to us, but I found myself shivering with anxiety.

Just as I turned back to Sophie, she looked up at me from the bed and said, “Stingo, I must tell you something now that I’ve never told anyone before. Never before.”

“Tell me, then.”

“Without knowing this, you wouldn’t understood anything about me at all. And I realize I must tell someone at last.”

“Tell me, Sophie.”

“You must get me a drink first.”

With no hesitation I went to her suitcase and plucked from the slippery jumble of linen and silk the second pint bottle of whiskey which I knew she had hidden there. Sophie, get drunk, I thought, you earned it. Then I walked to the tiny bathroom and half filled a sickly-green plastic glass with water and brought it to the bed. Sophie poured whiskey into the glass until it was full.

“Do you want some?” she said.

I shook my head and returned to the window, inhaling the brown chemical, acrid breaths of the distant blaze.

“On the day I arrived at Auschwitz,” I heard her say behind me, “it was beautiful. The forsythia was in bloom.”