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

  I woke up with my face afloat in a puddle of sunlight, and I reached with an instinctive twitch for Sophie’s arm, hair, breast, something. The Reverend Entwistle was, to put it with exactitude, ready for another fuck. This matutinal grope, the somnolent reaching out, was a Pavlovian reflex which I would experience often in later years. But Sophie was gone. Gone! Her absence, after the most complete (or perhaps I should say only) propinquity of flesh in my life, was spooky, almost palpable, and I drowsily realized it had partly to do with the smell of her, which remained like a vapor in the air: a musky genital odor, still provocative, still lascivious. In my waking daze I glanced down amid the landscape of tangled bedclothes, unable to believe that after all of its happy, exhausting toil my member still stood valiantly upright, serving as a tentpost to the worn and tacky sheet. Then I was washed by an awful panic, aware from the slant of the mirror that Sophie was not in the bathroom and therefore not in the room at all. Just as I leaped from the bed the headache of a hangover smote my skull like a mallet, and during my struggle with my trousers I was seized by further panic, or I should say, dread: the bell tolled outside and I counted the strokes—it was noon! My yells over the decrepit telephone brought no response. Half clothed, murmuring to myself curses, recriminations, filled with auguries of foul tidings, I burst out of the room and galloped down the fire stairs to the lobby with its single Negro bellboy pushing a mop, its potted rubber plants and rump-sprung armchairs and overflowing spittoons. There the old codger who had first greeted me drowsed behind the desk, mooning over the waiting room’s midday desuetude. At the sight of me he came alert, and proceeded to unfold what was simply the worst news I had ever heard.

  “She came down real early, Reverend,” he said, “so early she had to wake me up.” He looked at the bellboy. “What time you reckon it was, Jackson?"

  “Hit must have been aroun’ six.”

  “Yes, it was about six o’clock. Just dawn. She looked like she was in a real state, Reverend.” His pause seemed a little apologetic. “I mean, well, I think she’d had several beers. Her hair was every whichaway. Anyway, she got on the phone here, long-distance to Brooklyn, New York. I couldn’t help overhearing. She was talkin’ to someone—a man, I guess. She began to cry a lot and told him she was leavin’ here right away. Kept callin’ to him—she was real upset, Reverend. Mason. Jason. Something like that.”

  “Nathan,” I said, hearing the catch in my voice. “Nathan! Oh, Jesus Christ...”

  Sympathy and concern—an emotional amalgam which suddenly appeared to me rather Southern and old-fashioned—welled up in the old clerk’s eyes. “Yes—Nathan. I didn’t know what to do, Reverend,” he explained. “She went on upstairs and then she came down with her bag and Jackson here took her over to Union Station. She looked awfully upset and I thought of you, and wondered... I thought of calling you on the phone but it was so early. And anyway, I didn’t want to butt in. I mean, it wasn’t my business.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” I kept hearing myself mutter, half aware of the questioning look on the face of the old man, who as a member of the Second Baptist Church of Washington was doubtless unprepared for such impiety from a preacher.

  Jackson took me back upstairs in the aged elevator, against whose curlicued cast-iron, unfriendly wall I leaned with my eyes closed in a state of stupefaction, unable to believe any of this or, even more intransigently, to accept it. Surely, I thought, Sophie would be lying in bed when I returned, the golden hair shining in a rectangle of sunshine, the nimble loving hands outstretched, beckoning me to renewed delight...

  Instead, tucked against the mirror above the lavatory in the bathroom, there was a note. Scrawled in pencil, it was testimony indeed to the imperfect command of written English of which Sophie had so recently lamented to me, but also to the influence of German, which she had learned from her father so many years before in Cracow and which until this moment I had not realized had embedded itself with such obstinacy, like cornices and moldings of Gothic stone, in her mind’s architecture.

  My dearest Stingo, your such a beautiful Lover I hate to leave and forgive me for not saying Good-Bye but I must go back to Nathan. Believe me you will find some wunderful Mademoiselle to make you happy on the Farm. I am so fond of you—you must not think bei this I am being cruel. But when I woke I was feeling so terrible and in Despair about Nathan, bei that I mean so filled with Gilt and thoughts of Death it was like Eis Ice flowing in my Blut. So I must be with Nathan again for whatever that mean. I may not see you again but do believe me how much knowing you have meaned to me. Your a great Lover Stingo. I feel so bad, I must go now. Forgive my poor englisch. I love Nathan but now feel this Hate of Life and God. FUCK God and all his Hände Werk. And Life too. And even what remain of Love.

  Sophie

  There was never any way of discovering precisely what took place between Sophie and Nathan when she returned that Saturday to Brooklyn. Because she had told me in such detail of the awful weekend in Connecticut the previous autumn, I may have been the only person knowing them both who had an inkling of what went on in their room where they met for the last time. But even I could only guess; they left no last-minute memos to help provide a key. As with most unspeakable events, there were certain troublesome “ifs” involved, making it all the more painful, in retrospect, to ponder the ways in which the whole thing might have been prevented. (Not that I think it really could have been prevented, in the end.) The most important of these suppositions involved Morris Fink, who, given his limited capabilities, had already performed more intelligently than anyone had a right to expect. No one ever determined just when Nathan came back to the house during the thirty-six hours or so after Sophie and I fled and before Sophie herself returned. It seems strange that Fink—who had for so long and so assiduously kept his eye on the goings and comings in the house—had not noticed that Nathan at some point had made his way back and secluded himself in Sophie’s room. But he later protested that he had not had a glimpse of Nathan, and I never saw any reason to doubt him, any more than I doubted his claim to having failed to see Sophie when she, too, reached the house. Assuming no mishaps or delays in the railroad and subway timetable, her return to the Pink Palace must have been at around noon on the day she left me in Washington.

  The reason I place Fink at such a critical focus in respect to these movements is simply that Larry—who had gotten back from Toronto and hurried to Flatbush to talk to Morris and Yetta Zimmerman—had entrusted the janitor to telephone him if and when he saw Nathan enter the house. I had given Fink the same instructions, and additionally, Larry had encouraged Morris with a fat tip. But doubtless Nathan (in whatever frame of mind and with what motive it is impossible to say) sneaked in when Morris was not looking or asleep, while Sophie’s later arrival simply must have escaped his notice. Also, I suspect that Morris was in bed when Sophie made her call to Nathan. Had Fink got in touch with Larry earlier, the doctor would have been there within minutes; he was the only person on earth who could have dealt with his demented brother, and I am certain that if he had been called, the outcome of this story would have been a different one. Perhaps no less calamitous, but different.

  On that Saturday, Indian summer had descended over the eastern seaboard, bringing shirt-sleeve weather, flies, a renascence of Good Humor men, and to most people that absurdly deceptive feeling that the onset of winter is a wicked illusion. I had that feeling the same afternoon in Washington (although my mind was really not on the weather), just as I imagine that Morris Fink had a touch of this sensation at the Pink Palace. He later said that he first realized, with growing astonishment, that Sophie was in her room when he heard the music floating down from above. This was around two o’clock. He knew nothing about the music she and Nathan had played so constantly, merely identifying it as “classic,” and confessing to me once that although it was too “deep” for him to understand, he found it more palatable than some of the popular crud that came from the radios and record players of
the other tenants.

  At any rate, he was surprised—no, really flabbergasted—to find that Sophie had returned; his mind jumped to an instantaneous connection with Nathan, and he alerted himself to the possibility that he might have to make that telephone call to Larry. But he had no evidence that Nathan was on the premises and he hesitated to call Larry when it might be a false alarm. He was by now deathly afraid of Nathan (he had been near enough to me two nights before to see me recoil from Nathan’s telephoned gunshot) and he pined hungrily to be able to appeal to the police—for protection, if nothing else. He had sensed a creepy presence in the house ever since Nathan’s last rampage, and had begun to feel so nervous about the Nathan–Sophie situation in general, so jittery and insecure, that he was on the verge of giving up the half-price room he received in exchange for his janitorial functions and telling Mrs. Zimmerman that he was going to move in with his sister in Far Rockaway. He had no longer any doubt that Nathan was the most sinister form of golem. A menace. But Larry had said that under no circumstances should he or anyone else get in touch with the police. So Morris waited downstairs by the hallway door, feeling the stickiness of the summery heat and listening to the complicated and fathomless music as it showered down.

  Then to his swelling wonder he watched the door upstairs open slowly and saw Sophie emerge partway from her room. There was nothing unusual in her appearance, he later recalled; she looked perhaps, well, a bit fatigued, with shadowy places beneath her eyes, but little in her expression betrayed strain or unhappiness or distress or any other “negative” emotion she might have logically been expected to show after the ordeal of the past few days. To the contrary, while she stood there for a moment with one hand caressing the doorknob, a curious, fleeting glint of mild amusement crossed her face, as if she might give a gentle laugh; her lips parted, her gleaming teeth caught the bright afternoon light, and then he saw her tongue run across her upper lip, interrupting the words she had been poised to say. Morris realized that she had caught sight of him, and his gut made a small lurch. He had had a crush on her for many months; her beauty still continued to pain him, as it had day in and day out, hopelessly, replenishing within him mingled freshets of heartache and horniness. She certainly deserved better than that meshuggener Nathan.

  But now he was struck by what she was wearing—a costume which even to his unpracticed eye appeared out of vogue, old-fashioned, but nonetheless served to set off her extraordinary loveliness: a white jacket worn over a wine-colored pleated satin skirt, a silk scarf wound around the neck, and tilted over the forehead a red beret. It made her look like a movie star from an earlier time—Clara Bow, Fay Wray, Gloria Swanson, somebody like that. Hadn’t he seen her dressed like this before? With Nathan? He couldn’t remember. Morris was intensely puzzled, not simply by her appearance but by the very fact of her being there. Only two nights before, she had left, with her luggage, in such a panic and with... That was another puzzlement. “Where’s Stingo?” he was about to ask in a friendly voice. But before he could open his mouth she walked the few steps to the banister, and leaning over, said, “Morris, would you mind getting me a bottle of whiskey?” And she let fall a five-dollar bill, which fluttered down and which he caught in midair, between his fingers.

  He ambled the five blocks over to Flatbush Avenue and bought a fifth of Carstairs. Returning in the sweltering heat, he loitered for a moment at the edge of the park, watching the playing fields of the Parade Grounds where the young men and boys kicked and passed footballs and tackled each other, and flung happy obscenities in the familiar flat clamorous yawp of Brooklyn; lack of rain for days made the dust rise in conical cyclones and whitened the brittle grass and the foliage at the edge of the park. Morris was easily distracted. He remembered later that for fifteen or twenty minutes he totally forgot that he was on an errand, when “classic” music jarred him from his empty diversion, blasting forth from Sophie’s window several hundred yards away. The music was boisterous and filled with what seemed to be trumpets. It reminded him of the task he had set out to perform, and of Sophie waiting, and he hurried back to the Pink Palace at a dogtrot now, nearly getting run down on Caton Avenue (he recalled vividly, as he did so many details of that afternoon) by a yellow Con Edison maintenance truck. The music grew louder as he approached the house, and he thought it might be wise to ask Sophie, as delicately as he could, to turn down the volume, but then reconsidered: it was daytime, after all, a Saturday to boot, and the other boarders were gone. The music washed harmlessly out over the neighborhood. Let the fucker play.

  He knocked at Sophie’s door, but there was no answer; he hammered again, and still there was no response. He set the bottle of Carstairs on the floor by the doorjamb and then went downstairs to his room, where he brooded for half an hour or so over his albums of matchbook covers. Morris was a collector; his room was also filled with soft-drink bottle caps. Soon he decided to have his customary nap. When he awoke it was late in the afternoon and the music had stopped. He remembered the clammy ominousness he felt; his apprehension seemed to be a part of the unseasonable and oppressive heat, close as a boiler room, which even in the approaching twilight remained stagnant on the breezeless air, drenching him in sweat. It had suddenly become so quiet in the place, he remarked to himself. On the remotest skyline of the park, heat lightning whooshed up, and to the west he thought he heard dull thunder. In the silent, darkening house he tramped back upstairs. The bottle of whiskey still stood at the bottom of the door. Morris knocked once again. The much-used door had a slight give, or play, which made a crack at the juncture with its frame, and while the door fastened shut automatically, there was another bolt that could be secured from inside; through the crack Morris could see that this interior mechanism was firmly latched, and so he knew that Sophie could not have left the room. Twice, three times he called out her name, but there was only silence, and his perplexity grew into worry when he noticed by peeping into the crack that no light shone in the room, even though it was rapidly growing dark. And so then he decided that it might be a good idea to call Larry. The doctor came within an hour, and together they broke down the door...

  Meanwhile, stewing in another little room in Washington, I came to a decision which effectively prevented me from having any influence on the matters at hand. Sophie had gotten a good six hours’ head start on me; even so, if I had pursued her without delay, I might have arrived in Brooklyn in time to deflect the blow which was hammering down. As it was, I fretted and agonized, and for reasons I still cannot perfectly understand, decided to go on down to Southampton without her. I think an element of resentment must have entered into my decision: petulant anger at her defection, a stab of real jealousy, and the bitter, despondent conclusion that from now on she could just damn well look after her own ass. Nathan, that shmuck! I had done all I could. Let her go back to her crazy Jewish sweetheart, that sheeny bastard. So, checking the dwindling resources of my wallet (ironically, I was still subsisting on Nathan’s gift), I decamped from the hotel in a vague sweat of anti-Semitism, trudged the many blocks in jungle heat to the bus station, where I bought a ticket for the long ride to Franklin, Virginia. I made up my mind to forget Sophie.

  By then it was one o’clock in the afternoon. I barely realized it but I was in a deep crisis. I actually had ached so intensely over this wicked, this monstrous disappointment—this betrayal!—that a kind of quivering St. Vitus’ dance had begun to possess my limbs. In addition, the carnal, raw-nerved discomfort of my hangover had become a crucifixion, my thirst was unquenchable, and by the time the bus nosed its way through the clotted traffic of Arlington, I was suffering from an anxiety attack which each one of my psychic monitors had begun to regard gravely, flashing alerts all through my flesh. Much of this had to do with that whiskey Sophie had sluiced down my throat. Never in my life had I seen my fingers tremble so uncontrollably, nor could I remember ever having trouble lighting a cigarette. There was also an extravagant nightmarishness about the passing moonscape which aggr
avated my depression and fear. The dreary suburbs, the high-rise penitentiaries, the broad Potomac viscid with sewage. When I was a child, not so long ago, the southern outskirts of the District had drowsed in dusty charm, a chain of bucolic crossroads. My God, look at it now. I had forgotten the illness which my native state had so rapidly undergone; bloated by war profits, the obscenely fecund urban squalor of Fairfax County swept across my vision like an hallucinated recapitulation of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and the sprawling concrete blight which only the day before I thought I was leaving behind forever. Was all this not merely Yankee carcinoma, spreading its growth into my beloved Old Dominion? Surely things would get better further south; nonetheless I felt compelled to lay my tender skull back against the seat, writhing as I did so with a combined fear and exhaustion such as I had never in my life known before.

  The driver called out, “Alexandria.” And here I knew I had to flee the bus. What, I wondered, would some intern at the local hospital think at the sight of this skinny distraught apparition in rumpled seersucker requesting to be put into a strait jacket? (And was it then that I knew with certainty that I would never again live in the South? I think so, but to this day I cannot be sure.)

  Yet I managed at last to put myself under reasonable control, fighting off the goblins of neurasthenia. By a series of interurban conveyances (including a taxi, which left me nearly broke) I got back to Union Station in time to catch the three o’clock train to New York. Until I seated myself in the stuffy coach I had not been able to permit myself images, memories of Sophie. Merciful God, my adored Polack, plunging deathward! I realized, in a stunning rush of clarity, that I had banished her from my thoughts during that aborted foray into Virginia for the simple reason that my subconscious had forbidden me to foresee or to accept what my mind in its all too excruciating awareness now insisted upon: that something terrible was going to happen to her, and to Nathan, and that my desperate journey to Brooklyn could in no way alter the fate they had embraced. I understood this not because I was prescient but because I had been willfully blind or dim-witted, or both. Hadn’t her last note spelled it out, so plainly that an innocent six-year-old could have divined its meaning, and hadn’t I been negligent, feloniously so, in failing to hurry after her immediately rather than taking that brainless bus ride across the Potomac? I was swept by anguish. To the guilt which was murdering her just as surely as her children were murdered must there now be added my own guilt for committing the sin of blind omission that might help seal her doom as certainly as Nathan’s own hands? I said to myself: Good Christ, where is a telephone? I’ve got to warn Morris Fink or Larry before it’s all over. But even as I thought this the train began to shudder forward, and I knew there could be no more communication until...