Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  Yet even as the gentle brew took hold, softly marinating my senses, and I ruminated on Bilbo’s fate, I was overtaken by another emotion; I suppose it might be called regret—faint regret perhaps, yet regret. A lousy way to die, I thought. Cancer of that kind must be ghastly, those monstrous metastasizing cells so close to the brain—hideous little microscopic boll weevils invading cheek, sinuses, eye socket, jaw, filling the mouth with its fulminating virulence until the tongue, engulfed, rotted and fell dumb. I shuddered a little. Yet it was not simply this agonizing mortal blow which the senator had suffered that caused me my odd and vagrant pang. It was something else, abstract and remote, intangible yet worrisome to my spirit. I knew something about Bilbo—something more, that is, than was known by the ordinary American citizen with even a marginal concern with politics and doubtless more than the editors of the New York Post. Certainly my knowledge was not profound, but even in the superficiality of my understanding I felt there had been revealed to me facets of Bilbo’s character that gave the heft of flesh and the stink of real sweat to that shingle-flat cartoon of the daily press. What I knew about Bilbo was not even particularly redeeming—he would remain a first-class scoundrel until the tumor strangled off his breath or its excrescence flooded through the portals of his brain—but it had at least allowed me to perceive human bones and dimensions through the papier-mâché stock villain from Dixie.

  In college—where, outside of “creative writing,” my only serious academic concern had been the study of the history of the American South—I had hacked out a lengthy term paper on that freakish and aborted political movement known as Populism, paying special attention to the Southern demagogues and rabble-rousers who had so often exemplified its seamier side. It was hardly a truly original paper, I recollect, but I put a great deal of thought and effort into its making, for a lad of twenty or so, and it earned me a glowing “A” at a time when “A’s” were hard to get. Drawing heavily on C. Vann Woodward’s brilliant study of Tom Watson of Georgia and concentrating on other hagridden folk heroes like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and James K. Vardaman and “Cotton Ed” Smith and Huey Long, I demonstrated how democratic idealism and honest concern for the common man were virtues which linked all these men together, at least in their early careers, along with a concomitant and highly vocal opposition to monopoly capitalism, industrial and business fat cats and “big money.” I then extrapolated from this proposition an argument to show how these men, basically decent and even visionary to begin with, were brought down by their own fatal weakness in face of the Southern racial tragedy; for each of them in the end, to one degree or another, was forced to play upon and exploit the poor-white rednecks’ ancient fear and hatred of the Negro in order to aggrandize what had degenerated into shabby ambition and lust for power.

  Although I did not deal with Bilbo at any great length, I learned from my ancillary research (and rather to my surprise, given the truly despicable public image he projected in the 1940s) that he, too, fitted into this classically paradoxical mold; Bilbo in much the same way as the others had commenced with enlightened principles, and indeed like the others, I discovered, had as a public servant produced reforms and contributions that had greatly advanced the common weal. It all may not have been much—measured against his nauseous mouthings which would have caused the most hidebound Virginia reactionary to recoil—but it was something. One of the nastiest abettors of the hateful dogma purveyed below the Mason-Dixon line, he seemed to me also—while I brooded over the haggard figure in a baggy white Palm Beach suit, ravaged like one already seized by death’s hand even as he slouched past a frayed palm tree into the New Orleans clinic—one of its chief and most wretched victims, and the faintest breath of regret accompanied my murmured farewell. Suddenly, thinking of the South, thinking of Bilbo and once again of Bobby Weed, I was riven by a sharp blade of despondency. How long, Lord? I beseeched the begrimed and motionless chandeliers.

  Just then I caught sight of Sophie at the instant she pushed open the grimy glass front door of the bar, where a slant of golden light somehow captured at exactly the right angle the lovely swerve of her cheekbone below the oval eyes with their sleepy-sullen hint of Asia, and the broad harmony of the rest of her face, including—or, I should say, especially—the fine, elongated, slightly uptilted “Polish schnoz,” as Nathan lovingly called it, which terminated in a nice little button. There were certain moments when through such a nonchalant gesture—opening a door, brushing her hair, throwing bread to the Prospect Park swans (it had something to do with motion, attitude, the tilt of head, a flow of arms, a swing of hips)—she created a continuum of beauty that was positively breath-taking. The tilt, the flow, the swing together made up an exquisite particularity that was nobody’s but Sophie’s, and yes, by God, it took the breath away. I mean this literally, for synchronous with the stunning effect she made on my eyes as she stood there arrested in the doorway—blinking at the gloom, her flaxen hair drenched in the evening gold—I listened to myself give a thin but quite audible and breathless half-hiccup. I was still moronically in love with her.

  “Stingo, you’re all dressed up, where are you going, you’re wearing your cocksucker, you look so nice,” she said all in a tumbling rush, blushing crimson and correcting herself with a wonderful giggle even as I, too, formed the word seersucker! She giggled so much that, sitting down beside me, she buried her face on my shoulder. “Quelle horreur!”

  “You’ve been hanging around Nathan too long,” I said, joining in her laughter. Her sexual idiom, I knew, was lifted entirely from Nathan. I had realized this since that moment when—describing some puritanical Cracovian town fathers who had endeavored to put a fig leaf on a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David—she had said they had wanted “to cover up his schlong.”

  “Dirty words in English or Yiddish sound better than they do in Polish,” she said after she had recovered. “Do you know what the word for fuck in Polish is? It’s pierdolić. It just doesn’t have the same quality that the English word has. I like fuck much better.”

  “I like fuck much better too.”

  The drift of conversation made me both flustered and a little aroused (from Nathan she had also absorbed an innocent candor I was still unable to get used to), and so I managed to change the subject. I pretended nonchalance even though her presence still stirred me to the very pit of my stomach, inflamed me in a way that was all the more distracting because of the perfume she was wearing—the same herbal scent, distinctly unsubtle and loamy and provocative, which had stung my libidinal longings on that first day when we went to Coney Island. Now that perfume seemed to float up from between her breasts, which to my great surprise were most amply on show, appetizingly framed by her low-cut silk blouse. It was a new blouse, I was sure, and not really her style. During the weeks I had known her she had been aggravatingly conservative and low-keyed in her dress (aside from the flair for costumery she shared with Nathan, which was a different matter) and wore clothes clearly not calculated to focus eyes on her body, especially her upper torso; she was excessively demure even at a time in fashion when the womanly figure, badly depreciated, was rather down and out. I had seen her bosom browsing about beneath silk and cashmere and a nylon swimsuit but never with any definition. I could only theorize that this was some psychic extension of the prudish way she doubtless had to cloak herself in the rigid Catholic community of prewar Cracow, a practice she must have found hard to abandon. Also, to a lesser degree, I think she may not have wanted to expose to the world what had been wreaked upon her body by the privation of the past. Her dentures sometimes came loose. Her neck still had unbecoming little wrinkles, slack flesh pulled at the back of her arms.

  But by now Nathan’s year-long campaign to restore her to health and plumpness had begun to pay off; at least it seemed that Sophie was beginning to think so, for she had liberated her slightly freckled, pretty demiglobes as openly as she could and remain a lady, and I glanced at them with enormous appreciation. All it took for bo
obs, I thought, was great American nutrition. They caused me slightly to shift my focus of erogenous dreamery away from the few glimpses I had had of her achingly desirable, harmoniously proportioned Elberta peach of a derriere. Now I soon discovered that she had gotten herself rigged out in these sexpot duds because it was to be a very special evening for Nathan. He was going to reveal something wonderful about his work to Sophie and me. It was going to be, said Sophie, quoting Nathan, “a bombshell.”

  “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 t
he 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 Nathan 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.