Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  But suddenly he broke away from her. “Let’s go now,” she heard him say. Then: “We’ll have so much fun later. A ball!” And she knew what he meant. Sex with Nathan in his amphetamine thrall was no mere fun—it was unharnessed, oceanic, otherworldly. And it went on forever...

  “I didn’t think anything terrible was going to happen until late in the party,” Sophie told me. “This jam session at Morty Haber’s. It was a fear I never felt before with Nathan. Morty Haber had a big loft in a building not far from Brooklyn College and that’s where the party was. Morty—you met him on the beach that day—was an instructor in biology at the college and was one of Nathan’s good friends. I liked Morty, but to be very honest, Stingo, I wasn’t terribly fond of most of Nathan’s friends, male or female. Some of this was my fault, I know. I was very shy, for one thing, and my English wasn’t all that good then. I really mean it when I say I could speak English better than I could understand it, and I would get so lost when they all begun to talking so fast. And they were always talking about things I have no knowledge of or interest in—Freud and psychoanalysis and penis envy and things such as that which maybe I would have cared for a little bit more if they hadn’t been solemn and serious about it all the time. Oh, I got along with them all right, you must understand. I would just turn my mind off and think of other things when they begun talking about the theory of the orgasm and orgones and such. Quel ennui! And I think they liked me okay too, though they had always been a little suspicious of me, and curious, because I would never tell much of my past life and remained a little aloof. Also, I was the only shiksa in the crowd and a Polack also. That made me kind of strange and mysterious, I think.

  “Anyway, it was late when we come to the party. You see, I tried to persuade him not to, but before we left Yetta’s he take another Benzedrine pill—a Benny he called it—and by the time we got into his brother’s car to drive to the party he was high, unbelievably high, like a bird, high like an eagle. Don Giovanni was playing on the car radio—Nathan knew the libretto by heart, he sang very good opera Italian—and he joined in and sung at the top of his voice and got so wound up in the whole opera that he missed the turn to Brooklyn College and goes all the way down Flatbush Avenue practically to the ocean. He was driving very fast too, and I was beginning to feel a little worried. So all this singing and driving make us late to Morty’s, it must have been after eleven. It was a huge party, there were at least a hundred people there. There was a very famous jazz group there—I’ve forgotten the name of the man who played the clarinet—and I heard the music coming in the door. It was awfully loud, I thought. I am not so very fond of jazz, really, although a little of it I was beginning to like just before... before Nathan went away.

  “Most of the people were from B.C., graduate students, teachers, et cetera, but a lot of other people too, from all over, a very mixed group. Some quite beautiful girls from Manhattan who were models, many musicians, quite a few Negroes. I had never seen so many Negroes so close before, they were very exotic to me and I loved to hear them laugh. Everyone was drinking and having a good time. Also, there was this strange-smelling smoke I could smell, the first time I ever have such a smell in my nose, and Nathan told me it was marijuana; he called it tea. Most of the people seemed so happy and at first the party was not so bad, it was good, I didn’t feel the terrible thing coming yet. We saw Morty at the door when we come in. The very first thing Nathan told him about was his experiment, he was practically shouting the news. I heard him say, ‘Morty, Morty, we broke through! We busted that serum enzyme problem wide open!’ Morty had heard all about this—as I say, he teached biology—and he patted Nathan hard on the back and they had a few toasts with beer and a group of other people come up and congratulated him. I remember how wonderfully happy I felt, being so close, I mean being so much loved by this wonderful man who was going to live forever in the history of medical research. And then, Stingo, I could have fainted dead on the spot. Because just then he put his arm around me and squeezed me tight and he said to everyone, ‘It is all due to the devotion and companionship of this lovely lady, the finest woman Poland has produced since Marie Sklodowska Curie, who is going to honor me forever by becoming my bride.’

  “Stingo, I wish I could describe how I felt. Imagine! To be married! I was in a daze. It was nothing I could really believe, yet it was happening. Nathan kissing me and the people all coming up with smiles to congratulate us. I thought I was dreaming this. Because, you see, it was so completely sudden. Oh, he had talked about us getting married before but always in this light way, sort of joking, and although it always excited me, this idea, I had never taken it seriously. So now I am in this daze, this dream which I couldn’t believe.”

  Sophie paused. When in the process of anatomizing the past or her relationship with Nathan, and the mystery of Nathan himself, she often had the habit of thrusting her face into her hands, as if to seek for an answer or a clue in the encompassing darkness of her cupped palms. She did this now, and only after many seconds raised her head and resumed, saying, “Now it is so easy to see that this... this announcement was only a part of his being on the pills, this stuff, this high that was taking him farther and farther out into space like some eagle. But at that time I just couldn’t make such a connection. I thought it was real, all this about our being married sometime, and I couldn’t remember being so happy. I begun to drink a little wine and the party got all wonderfully jumbled. Nathan finally walked off somewhere and I talked to some of his friends. They were still congratulating me. There was one Negro friend of Nathan’s I had always liked, a painter named Ronnie Something. I went out on the roof with Ronnie and a very sexy Oriental girl, I’ve forgotten her name, and Ronnie asked me if I wanted some tea. I didn’t quite realize what at first. Naturally, at the moment I thought he meant, you know, the drink you put sugar and lemon in, but he make this big smile and then I know that he was talking of marijuana. I was a little afraid to take it—I have always been frightened to lose control—but oh, anyway, my mood was so happy that I feel that I could take anything without fear. So Ronnie give me the little cigarette and I smoked it deeply and very soon I could understood why people used it for pleasure—it was wonderful!

  “The marijuana filled me with this sweet glow. It was chilly on the roof but all of a sudden I was feeling warm and the whole earth and the night and the future seemed more beautiful than ever, if that could be possible. Une merveille, la nuit! Brooklyn down below, with a million lights. I stayed out on the roof for a long time talking with Ronnie and his Chinese girl and listening to the jazz music, looking up at the stars and feeling better than I could ever remember. I guess I haven’t realize how much time had passed because when I went back inside I see it was late, nearly four o’clock. The party was still going very much, you know, strong, lots of music still, but some of the people were gone and for a short time I hunted for Nathan but couldn’t find him. I asked several guests and they pointed out a certain room near one end of the loft. So I went to it and there Nathan was with six or seven other people. There was no fun at all there any more. It was kind of quiet. It was as if someone have just suffered a terrible accident and they were discussing what to do. It was deeply somber there and when I went in I think it was then that I begun to get a little upset, uncomfortable. Begun to realize that something very serious, very bad was going to happen with Nathan. It was an awful feeling, as if I have been hit by a freezing seawave. Bad, very bad, what I felt.

  “You see, they were all listening to the radio about the hangings in Nuremberg. It was some special shortwave broadcast, but actual—you know, direct—and I could hear this CBS reporter in the static sounding very far-off describing everything at Nuremberg just as they were doing the hangings. He said that Von Ribbentrop had already gone, and I think Jodl, and then I think he said Julius Streicher was next. Streicher! I couldn’t stand this! I suddenly felt clammy all over, sick, awful. It is difficult to describe, this sick feeling, because of course you could
only be, I mean, insane with gladness that these men were being hanged—I wasn’t sick at that—but because it just reminded me again of so much I wanted to forget. I had this same feeling last spring, like I told you, Stingo, when I saw that picture in the magazine of Rudolf Höss with a rope tied around his neck. And so in that room with these people listening about the hangings at Nuremberg, I just wanted suddenly to escape, you know, and I kept saying to myself: Won’t I ever be free of the past? I watched Nathan. He was still on his incredible high, I could tell from his eyes, but he was listening like everyone else to the hangings and his face was very dark and aching. There was something frightening and wrong about his face. And the rest. Everything that was fun, that was truly gay about the party had disappeared, at least in that room. It was like being at a Mass for the dead. Finally the news stopped or maybe the radio become turned off or something and the people all began talking very seriously and with this sudden passion.

  “I knew all of them a little, they were friends of Nathan. There was one friend especially I remember. I have talked to him before. His name was Harold Schoenthal, Nathan’s age I guess, and he taught I think it was philosophy at the college. He was very intense and serious but he was one of the ones I liked a little more than the others. I thought he was really a very feeling person. He always seemed to me very tortured and unhappy, very conscious of being Jewish, and he talked a lot, and this night I remember he was even more in this high key and excited, though I’m sure he wasn’t high on anything like Nathan, even beer or wine. He was quite, well, arresting-looking, with a bald head and a droopy mustache like—I don’t know the animal in English—a morse on the iceberg, and a big belly. Yes, walrus. He kept walking up and down the room with his pipe—people always listened when he spoke—and he begun to say things such as ‘Nuremberg is a farce, these hangings are a farce. This is only a token vengeance, a sideshow!’ He said, ‘Nuremberg is an obscene diversion to give the appearance of justice while murderous hatred of the Jews still poisons the German people. It is the German people who should be themselves exterminated—they who allowed these men to rule them and kill Jews. Not these’—and he used these words—‘not these handful of carnival villains.’ And he said, ‘What about Germany of the future? Are we going to allow those people to grow rich and slaughter Jews again?’ It was like listening to a very powerful speaker, this man. I had heard he was supposed to keep his students hypnotized and I remember being fascinated as I watched and listened. He had this terrible angoisse in his voice, talking about the Jews. He asked where on earth are the Jews safe today? And then answered himself, saying nowhere. Alors, he asked, where on earth have the Jews ever been safe? And he said nowhere.

  “Then suddenly I realized he was talking about Poland. He was speaking how at one of the trials, Nuremberg or somewhere, there have been this testimony about how during the war some Jews escaped from one of the camps in Poland and tried to find safety among the local people but the Poles turned against the Jews and did not help them. They did horribly worse. In fact, they murdered them all. These Polish people just killed all the Jews. This was a horrible fact, Schoenthal said, and it proves that Jews can never be safe anywhere. He almost shouted that word anywhere. Even in America! Mon dieu, I remember his rage. When he spoke of Poland I felt even sicker and my heart begun to beat fast, although I don’t think he was giving me any special thought. He said Poland might be the worst example, perhaps even worse than Germany or at least as bad, for wasn’t it in Poland where after the death of Pilsudski, who protected the Jews, the people leaped to persecute the Jews as soon as they had a chance? He said wasn’t it in Poland that young, harmless Jewish students were segregated, made to sit on separate seats at school and treated worse than Negroes in Mississippi? What make people think this couldn’t happen in America, things like these ‘ghetto benches’ for the students? And when Schoenthal speak like this, of course I couldn’t stop thinking of my father. My father, who helped create that idea himself. It was suddenly like the presence, l’esprit of my father have come into the room very near me, and I wanted to drop through the floor. I couldn’t stand no more of this. I had put such things away from myself for so long, buried them, sweeped them under the rug—a coward, I suppose, but I felt this way—and now it was all pouring out of this Schoenthal and I couldn’t stand it. Merde, I couldn’t stand it!

  “So when Schoenthal was still talking I went tiptoe around to Nathan’s side and make a whisper to him that we must go home, remember the trip to Connecticut tomorrow. But Nathan didn’t move. He was like—well, he was like someone who was hypnotized, like one of Schoenthal’s students I had heard about, just staring at him, listening to each word. But finally he whispered back to me that he was staying, that I should now go home by myself. He had this wild-eyed look, I was frightened. He said, ‘I won’t be able to sleep until Christmas.’ He said with this crazy look, ‘Go home now and sleep and I’ll come and get you early in the morning.’ So I left in a very big hurry, stopping up my ears to Schoenthal, whose words were half killing me. I took a taxi home, feeling terrible. I completely forgot that Nathan said we were going to be married, I felt that awful. I felt every minute like I must begin to scream.”

  Connecticut.

  The capsule in which reposed the sodium cyanide (tiny granulated crystals as characterless as Bromo-Seltzer, said Nathan, and similarly water soluble, melting almost immediately, though not effervescent) was really quite small, a bit smaller than any medicinal capsule she had ever seen, and was also metallically reflective, so that as he held it inches above her face where she lay against the pillow—wiggling it between thumb and forefinger and causing the pinkish oblong to do a little midair pirouette—she could see shimmering along its surface the miniature conflagration which was only a captured image of the autumnal leaves outside, set afire by the sunset. Drowsily Sophie inhaled the odor of cooking from the kitchen two floors below—a mingled fragrance of bread and, she thought, cabbage—and watched the capsule dance slowly in his hand. Sleep moved up like a tide through her brain; she was aware of steady lulling vibrations that partook of both sound and light, erasing apprehension—blue trance of Nembutal. She mustn’t suck it. She would have to bite down hard, he told her, but don’t worry: there would be a swift bittersweet taste like that of almonds, an odor a bit like that of peaches, then nothing. Profound black nothing—rienada fucking nothing!—accomplished with an instantaneousness so complete as to preclude even the onset of pain. Possibly, he said, just possibly a split second’s distress—discomfort rather—but as brief and as inconsequential as a hiccup. Rien nada niente fucking nothing!

  “Then, Irma my love, then—” A hiccup.

  Without looking at him, staring past him at the amber photograph of some faded bekerchiefed grandmother immobilized in the shadows on the wall, she murmured, “You said you wouldn’t. So long ago today you said you wouldn’t—”

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  “Wouldn’t call me that. Wouldn’t say Irma again.”

  “Sophie,” he said without emotion. “Sophie love. Not Irma. Of course. Of course. Sophie. Love. Sophielove.”

  He seemed to be much calmer now, the frenzy of the morning, the raging lunacy of the afternoon stilled or at least momentarily calmed by the same Nembutal he had given her—the blessed barbiturate which in their common terror they thought he would never find but, only two hours ago, found. He was calmer but, she knew, still deranged; curious, she thought, how in this present pacified form of his derangement he seemed no longer so frightening and menacing, despite the unequivocal menace of the cyanide capsule six inches from her eyes. The minuscule Pfizer trademark was clearly imprinted on the gelatine; the capsule was tiny. It was, he explained, a special veterinary capsule, meant to contain antibiotics for small cats and puppy dogs, which he had obtained as a receptacle for the dose; and because of office technicalities, the capsules themselves had been more difficult to get hold of yesterday than the ten grains of sodium cyanide—five grains
for her and five for himself. It was no joke, she knew; at some other time and place she would have regarded the whole display as one of his morbid tricks: the shiny pink pod at the last minute popping open between his fingers to reveal a wee flower, a garnet, a chocolate kiss. But not after this day and its unending delirium. She knew quite beyond doubt that the little casket held death. Odd, though. She felt nothing but a spreading lassitude now, watching him as he raised the capsule to his lips and inserted it between his teeth, biting down just hard enough to lightly bend the surface but not to break it. Was her lack of terror due to the Nembutal or to some intuition that he was still faking? He had done this before. He withdrew the capsule from his mouth and smiled. “Rienada fucking nothing.” She recalled the other moment when he flirted thus, less than two hours before in this very room, although it seemed a week ago, a month. And she wondered now through what miraculous alchemy (the Nembutal?) had he been made to cease his daylong uninterrupted rant. Talktalktalktalktalk... The talk had only a few times stopped since that morning at about nine o’clock when he stormed up the steps at the Pink Palace and awakened her...