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

by Styron, William

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “His work,” she replied, “his research. He told me he would say to us tonight about his discovery. They finally make what Nathan calls the breakthrough.”

  “That’s marvelous,” I said, genuinely excited. “You mean this stuff he’s been so... mysterious about? He’s finally got it licked, is that what you mean?”

  “That’s what he said, Stingo!” Her eyes were ashine. “He’s going to tell us tonight.”

  “God, that’s terrific,” I said, feeling a small but vivid interior thrill.

  I knew virtually nothing about Nathan’s work. Although he had told me in large (though generally impenetrable) detail about the technical nature of his research (enzymes, ion transference, permeable membranes, etc., also the fetus of that miserable rabbit), he had never divulged to me—nor had I out of reticence asked—anything concerning the ultimate justification for this complex and, beyond doubt, profoundly challenging biological enterprise. I knew also, from what she had intimated, that he had kept Sophie in the dark about his project. My earliest conjecture—farfetched even for a scientific ignoramus like myself (even then I was beginning to rue the lilac fin de siècle hours of my college days, with their total immersion in metaphysical poesy and Quality Lit., their yawning disdain of politics and the raw dirty world, their quotidian homage to the Kenyon Review, to the New Criticism and the ectoplasmic Mr. Eliot)—was that he was creating life full-blown from a test tube. Maybe Nathan was founding a new race of Homo sapiens, finer, fairer, fleeter than the bedeviled sufferers of the present day. I even envisioned a tiny embryonic Superman whom Nathan might be concocting at Pfizer, an inch-high square-jawed homunculus complete with cape and “S” emblazoned on his breast, ready to leap to his place in the color pages of Life as another miraculous artifact of our age. But this was a bootless piece of whimsy and I was really in the dark. Sophie’s sudden news that soon we would be enlightened was like receiving an electric jolt. I wanted only to hear more.

  “He telephoned me this morning at work,” she explained, “at Dr. Blackstock’s, and said he wanted to have lunch with me. He wanted to tell me something. His voice sounded so excited, I just couldn’t imagine what it was. He was calling from his laboratory, and it was so unusual, you see, Stingo, because we almost never have lunch together. We are working so far away from each other. Besides, Nathan says we see so much of each other that having lunch together is maybe a little... de trop. Anyway, he called this morning and insisted in this very excited voice, and so we met in this Italian restaurant near Lafayette Square, where we had been together last year when we first met. Oh, Nathan was just wild with excitement! I thought he had a fever. And when we ate lunch he started to tell me what had happened. Listen to this, Stingo. He said that this morning he and his team—this research team—have make the final breakthrough they were hoping for. He said they were right upon the edge of the final discovery. Oh, Nathan could not eat he was so full of joy! And you know, Stingo, while Nathan was telling me these things I remember that it was right at this same table a year ago that he first told me about his work. He said what he was doing was a secret. What it was precisely he could not reveal, even to me. But I remember this—I remember him telling me that if it was successful it would end up being one of the greatest medical advances of all time. Those were his exact words, Stingo. He said that it wasn’t his work alone, there were others. But he was very proud of his own contribution. And then he said it again: one of the greatest medical advances of all time! He said it would win the Nobel Prize!”

  She paused and I saw that her own face was rosy with excitement. “God, Sophie,” I said, “that’s just wonderful. What do you think it is? Didn’t he give you any hint at all?”

  “No, he said he would have to wait until tonight. He could not tell me the secret at lunch, just that they had make the breakthrough. There is this great secrecy in the companies that make drugs like Pfizer, that is why Nathan is sometimes so mysterious. But I understand.”

  “You’d think a few hours wouldn’t make any difference,” I said. I felt a frustrating impatience.

  “Yes, but he said that it does. Anyway, Stingo, we’ll know what it is very soon. Isn’t it incredible, isn’t it formidable?” She squeezed my hand until my fingertips went numb.

  It’s cancer, I thought all during Sophie’s little soliloquy. I had really begun to burst with happiness and pride, sharing Sophie’s own radiant exuberance. It’s a cure for cancer, I kept thinking; that unbelievable son of a bitch, that scientific genius whom I am privileged to call a friend has discovered a cure for cancer. I signaled to the bartender for more beer. A fucking cure for cancer!

  But just at this instant, it seemed to me, Sophie’s mood underwent a subtly disturbing change. The excitement, the high spirits fled her and a note of concern—of apprehension—stole into her voice. It was as if she were affixing a gloomy and unpleasant afterthought to a letter which had been all the more factitiously cheerful because of the necessity of the grim postscript itself. (P.S. I want a divorce.) “We left the restaurant then,” she continued, “because he said that before we went back to work he wanted to buy me something, to celebrate. To celebrate his discovery. Something I could wear tonight when we celebrate together. Something chic and sexy. So we go to this very fine shop where we have been before and he buy me this blouse and skirt. And shoes. And some hats, and bags. Do you like it, this blouse?”

  “It’s a knockout,” I said, understating my admiration.

  “It’s very... daring, I think. Anyway, Stingo, the point is that while we are in this shop and he has paid for the clothes and we are ready to leave, I see something strange about Nathan. I have seen it before but not too often and it always scares me a little. He said suddenly that he had a headache, back here, at the back of his head. Also, he was suddenly very pale and make sweat—perspiring, you know. You see, I think it was as if all the excitement was too much for him and he was having this reaction that made him a little sick. I told him he should go home, back to Yetta’s and lie down, take the afternoon off, but no, he said he must go back to the laboratory, there was still much to do. The headache, he said, was terrible. I wanted him so much to go home and rest but he said he must go back to Pfizer. So he took three aspirin from the lady who own the shop, and he is calm now, no longer excited like he was. He is quiet, mélancholique even. And then very quietly he kissed me goodby and said he would see me tonight, here—here with you, Stingo. He wants the three of us to go down to Lundy’s Restaurant for a wonderful seafood dinner to celebrate. To celebrate winning the Nobel Prize of 1947.”

  I had to tell her no. I was absolutely crushed at the idea that because of my father’s visit I would be unable to join them for the jamboree celebration; what a wicked disappointment! This augury of fabulous news was so itchingly teasing that I simply could not believe that I would be denied participating in the announcement when it came. “I’m just sorry beyond belief, Sophie,” I said, “but I’ve got to meet my father at Penn Station. But look, before I go, maybe Nathan can at least tell me what the discovery is. Then in a couple of days after my old man’s gone we can go out and have another celebration some other night.”

  She appeared not to be listening any too closely, and I heard her continue in a voice that seemed to me both subdued and invaded by hints of foreboding. “I just hope he is okay. Sometimes when he gets excited so much and gets so happy—then he gets these terrible headaches and sweats so much it go through his clothes, like he’s been in the rain. Then the happiness is gone. And oh, Stingo, it don’t happen every time. But sometimes it make him so very, very strange! It’s like he gets so tellement agité, so happy and flying that he is like an airplane going up and up into the stratosphere where the air is so thin that he can’t fly no more and the only way is down. I mean all the way down, Stingo! Oh, I hope Nathan’s okay.”

  “Listen, he’s going to be all right,” I assured her, a little uneasily. “Anyone with the story N
athan is going to tell has a right to act a little peculiar.” Although I could not share what were obviously her deep misgivings, I had to confess to myself that her words put me a bit on edge. Even so, I thrust them out of my mind. I wanted only for Nathan to arrive with news of his triumph and an explanation for this unbearably tantalizing mystery.

  The jukebox started to blare. The bar was beginning to fill up with its gray evening habitué-—most of them middle-aged and male, porridge-faced even in midsummer, North European Gentiles with flabby paunches and serious thirsts who ran the elevators and unplugged the plumbing of the ten-story Jewish pueblos whose homely beige-brick ranks stretched for block after block in the region behind the park. Aside from Sophie, few females ever ventured into the place. I never saw a single hooker—the conventional neighborhood and the tired and baggy clientele precluded even the idea of any such sport—but there were, this special evening, two smiling nuns who bore down on Sophie and me with some kind of rattling tin-plated chalice and a murmured plea for charity, in the name of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Their English was preposterously broken, They looked Italian and were extremely ugly—one of them in particular, who wore at the corner of her mouth an awesome wen the size, shape and color of one of those University Residence Club cockroaches, out of which hair sprouted like cornsilk. I averted my eyes but scrounged in my pocket and came up with two dimes; Sophie, however, confronted with the jingling cup uttered a “No!” with such vehemence that the nuns drew back with a concerted gasp, then scuttled away, and I turned to her in surprise.

  “Bad luck, two nuns,” she said morosely, then, after a pause, added, “I hate them! Weren’t they awful-looking!”

  “I thought you were brought up a good sweet Catholic girl,” I said in a joshing tone.

  “I was,” she replied, “but that was long ago. Anyway, I would hate nuns even if I cared about religion. Silly, stupid virgins! And so horrible-looking!” A tremor passed through her, she shook her head. “Awful! Oh, how I hate that stupid religion!”

  “You know, it’s really strange, Sophie,” I put in, “I remember a few weeks ago how you were telling me about your devout childhood, and your belief, and all that. What is it that—”

  But she shook her head again in a brisk, negative way, and lay her slender fingers on the back of my hand. “Please, Stingo, those nuns make me feel so pourri—rotten. Stinking. Those nuns grubbling...” She hesitated, looking perplexed.

  “I think you mean groveling,” I said.

  “Yes, groveling in front of a God who must be a monster, Stingo, if He exist. A monster!” She paused. “I don’t want to talk about religion. I hate religion. It is for, you know, des analphabétes, imbecile peoples.” She cast a glance at her wristwatch and remarked that it was after seven. Anxiety edged her voice. “Oh, I hope Nathan is okay.”

  “Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine,” I said again in my most reassuring voice. “Look, Sophie, Nathan’s really been under tremendous pressure with this research project, this breakthrough, whatever it is. That strain is bound to make him behave, well, erratically—you know what I mean? Don’t worry about him. I’d have a headache too if I’d been through his kind of wringer—especially when it’s resulted in this incredible achievement.” I paused. I seemed constantly compelled to add, “Whatever it is.” I patted her hand in return. “Now please, just relax. He’ll be here in a minute, I’m certain.” At this point I made another reference to my father and his arrival in New York (fondly mentioning his generous concern for me, and his moral support, though making no note of the slave Artiste and his part in my destiny, rather doubting that Sophie had sufficient comprehension of American history, at least yet, to be able to grasp the complexities of the debt I owed to that black boy), and I continued in a general way to praise the luck of those young men like myself, relatively few in number, who possessed parents of such tolerance and selflessness and the will to have faith, blind faith, in a son reckless enough to seek to pluck a few leaves from the laurel branch of art. I was getting a little bit high. Fathers of this largeness of vision and amplitude of spirit were scarce, I averred sentimentally, beginning to feel my lips tingling from the beer.

  “Oh, you’re so lucky to still have a father,” said Sophie in a faraway voice. “I miss my father so.”

  I felt a little ashamed—no, not ashamed, inadequate would be better—thinking suddenly of the story she had told me, some weeks before, about her father herded together with the other Cracow professors like so many pigs, the Nazi machine guns, the stifling vans, Sachsenhausen, then death by firing squad in the cold snows of Germany. God, I thought, what Americans had been spared in our era, after all. Oh, we had done our brave and needful part as warriors, but how scant our count of fathers and sons compared to the terrible martyrdom of those unnumbered Europeans. Our glut of good fortune was enough to make us choke.

  “It has been long enough now,” she went on, “that I no longer grieve like I did, but yet I miss him. He was such a good man—that is what make it so terrible, Stingo! When you think of all the bad people—Poles, Germans, Russians, French, all nationalities—all these evil people who escaped, people who killed Jews who are still alive right now. In Germany. And places like Argentina. And my father—this good man—who had to die! Isn’t that enough to make you not believe in this God? Who can believe in God who turn His back on people like that?” This outburst—this little aria—had come so swiftly that it surprised me; her fingers trembled slightly. Then she calmed down. And once again—as if she had forgotten that she had already once told me, or perhaps because the repetition gave her some forlorn comfort—she sketched the portrait she imagined of her father, in Lublin many years before, saving Jews from a Russian pogrom at peril to his life.

  “What is the word l’ironie in English?”

  “Irony?” I said.

  “Yes, such an irony that a man like that, a man like my father, risk his life for Jews and die, and the Jew-killers live, so many of them, right now.”

  “I’d say that’s less an irony, Sophie, than the way of the world,” I concluded a little sententiously but with seriousness, feeling the need to relieve my bladder.

  I got up and made my way to the men’s room, weaving slightly, aglow at the edges of my skin with a penumbra of Rheingold, the jolly, astringent beer served at the Maple Court on draft. I richly enjoyed the men’s john at the Maple Court, where, cantilevered slightly forward over the urinal, I could brood over the plashing clear stream while Guy Lombardo or Sammy Kaye or Shep Fields or some other glutinously innocuous band rumbled faintly from the jukebox beyond the walls. It was wonderful to be twenty-two and a little drunk, knowing that all went well at the writing desk, shiveringly happy in the clutch of one’s own creative ardor and in that “grand certitude” Thomas Wolfe was always hymning—the certitude that the wellsprings of youth would never run dry, and that the wrenching anguish endured in the crucible of art would find its recompense in everlasting fame, and glory, and the love of beautiful women.

  As I blissfully pissed I eyed the ubiquitous homosexual graffiti (inscribed there, God knows, not by the Maple Court regulars but by the transient trade which managed to scribble up the walls of any place, no matter how unlikely, where males unlimbered their joints) and with delight gazed once again at the smoke-stained but still vivid caricature on the wall: companion-piece to the mural outside, it was a masterpiece of 1930s innocent ribaldry, displaying Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in contortionist Peeping Tom postures, gleefully asquint through the interstices of a garden trellis as they observed little Betty Boop, enchanting and voluptuous of calf and thigh, squatting to take a pee. Suddenly I was stabbed with alarm, sensing an unholy and unnatural presence of flapping vulturous black, until I realized in an instant that the two mendicant nuns had blundered into the wrong facility. They were gone then in a flash, squawking in distressed Italian, and I rather hoped they had gotten a look at my schlong. Was it their entry—duplicating the bad omen Sophie had felt only a short
while before—that presaged the evil contretemps of the next fifteen minutes or so?

  I heard Nathan’s voice over Shep Fields’ rippling rhythm even as I approached the table. It was a voice not so much loud as incredibly assertive and it cut through the music like a hacksaw. It was filled with trouble, and though I wanted to retreat when I heard it I dared not, feeling something momentous in the air which impelled me on toward the voice and Sophie. And so totally immersed was Nathan in this rancorous message he was imparting to Sophie, so single-minded did he seem at that moment, that I was able to stand waiting by the table long minutes, listening in miserable discomfort while Nathan bullyragged and tore at her, quite oblivious that I was there.

  “Haven’t I told you that the only single thing I absolutely demand from you is fidelity?” he said.

  “Yes, but—” She could not get the words in.

  “And didn’t I tell you that if you were ever with this guy Katz—ever again, outside of work—that if you ever so much as walked ten feet with this cheap shmatte, I’d break your ass?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And this afternoon he brings you home again in his car! Fink saw you. And not only that, that cheap motherfucker, you take him up to the room. And you’re there for an hour with him. Did he lay you a couple of times? Oh, I’ll bet you Katz does quite a number with that fast chiropractor’s dick of his!”