Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  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 aggravated 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...

  And so I went into a bizarre religious convulsion, brief in duration but intense. The Holy Bible—which I carried in a bundle along with Time magazine and the Washington Post—had been part of my itinerancy for years. It had also, of course, served as an appendage to my costume as the Reverend Entwistle. I had not been in any sense a godly-minded creature, and the Scriptures were always largely a literary convenience, supplying me with allusions and tag lines for the characters in my novel, one or two of whom had evolved into pious turds. I considered myself an agnostic, emancipated enough from the shackles of belief and also brave enough to resist calling on any such questionable gaseous vertebrate as the Deity, even in times of travail and suffering. But sitting there—desolate, weak beyond description, terrified, utterly lost—I knew that I had let slip all my underpinnings, and Time and the Post seemed to offer no prescription for my torment. A fudge-colored lady of majestic heft and girth squeezed into the seat beside me, filling the ambient space with the aroma of heliotrope. We were speeding north now, moving out of the District of Columbia. I turned to glance at her, for I was aware of her gaze on me. She was scrutinizing me with round, moist, friendly brown eyes the size of sycamore balls. She smiled, gave a wheeze, and her expression embraced me with all the motherly concern my heart at that hopeless moment longed for. “Sonny,” said she, with an incredible amplitude of faith and good cheer, “dey is only one Good Book. And you got it right in yo’ hand.” Credentials established, my fellow pilgrim pulled out of a shopping bag her own Bible and settled back to read with an aspirated sigh of pleasure and a wet smacking of lips. “Believe in His word,” she reminded me, “an’ ye shall be redeemed—dat’s de holy Gospel an’ de Lawd’s truth. Amen.”

  I replied, “Amen,” opening my Bible to the exact middle of its pages where, I remembered from idiot Sunday School lessons, I would discover the Psalms of David. “Amen,” I said again. As the hart panteth after the water brooks so panteth my soul after thee, O God... Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Suddenly I felt I had to be secreted from all human eyes. Lurching to the washroom, I locked myself in and sat on the can, scrawling in my notebook apocalyptic messages to myself whose content I barely understood even as they streamed out from my scrambled consciousness: last bulletins of a condemned man, or the ravings of one who, perishing on the earth’s most remote and rotted strand, floats crazed jottings in bottles out upon the black indifferent bosom of eternity. “Why you cryin’, sonny?” said the woman later when I slumped down beside her. “Somebody done hurt you bad?” I could say nothing in reply, but then she made a suggestion, and after a bit I mustered enough possession to read in unison with her, so that our voices rose in a harmonious and urgent threnody above the clatter of the train. “Psalm Eighty-eight,” I would suggest. To which she would reply, “Dat is some fine psalm.” O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles... We read aloud through Wilmington, Chester and past Trenton, turning from time to time to Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. After a while we tried the Sermon on the Mount, but somehow it didn’t work for me; the grand old Hebrew woe seemed more cathartic, so we went back to Job. When at last I raised my eyes and looked outside, it had grown dark and lightning in green sheets heaved up over the western horizon. The dark priestess, whom I had grown attached to, if not to love, got off in Newark. “Ev’ything gone be all right,” she predicted.

  That night the Pink Palace from the outside looked like the set of one of those glossy, brutal detective movies I had seen a hundred times. To this day I remember so plainly my feeling of acceptance when I made my way up the sidewalk—my willingness not to be surprised. All the avatars of death were there as I had prefigured them: ambulances, fire engines, emergency vans, police cars with pulsing red lights—these in gross excess of need, as if the poor ramshackle house had harbored some terrible massacre instead of two people who had willed themselves into an almost decorous ending, going off silently to sleep. A floodlight enveloped all in its acetylene glare, there was one of those grim barricades with its cardboard sign—Do Not Cross—and everywhere stood clots of thuggish policemen chewing gum and negligently swatting their thick behinds. I argued with one of these cops—a choleric ugly Irishman—asserting my right to enter, and I might have remained outside for hours had it not been for Larry. He spied me and spoke brusquely to the meat-faced brute, whereupon I was allowed to go into the downstairs hallway. In my own room, with its door ajar, Yetta Zimmerman half lay, half sat sprawled in a chair, muttering distractedly in Yiddish. Plainly, she had just been informed of the happenings; her wide homely face, usually such an image of fine humor, was bloodless, had the vacant stare of shock. An ambulance attendant hovered near her, ready to administer a syringe. Saying nothing, Larry led me upstairs past a cluster of wormy-looking police reporters and two or three photographers who seemed to respond to any moving object by exploding flashbulbs. Cigarette smoke hung so thickly over the landing that for an instant I thought the place might have earlier been on fire. Near the entrance to Sophie’s room Morris Fink, even more drained of color than Yetta and looking genuinely bereft, spoke in trembling tones to a detective. I stopped long enough for a word with Morris. He told me a little about the afternoon, the music. And finally there was the room, glowing in coralline softness beyond the battered-down door.

  I blinked in the dim light, then gradually caught sight of Sophie and Nathan where they lay on top of the bright apricot bedspread. They were clad as on that long-ago Sunday when I first saw them together—she in her sporty togs from a bygone time, he in those wide-striped, raffish, anachronistic gray flannels that had made him look like a successful gambler. Dressed thus, but recumbent and entwined in each other’s arms, they appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely whisper to each other of fond matters, and were frozen in this grave and tender embrace forever.

  “I wouldn’t look at their faces, if I were you,” said Larry. Then after a pause he added, “But they didn’t suffer. It was sodium cyanide. It was over in a few seconds.”

  To my shame and chagrin I felt my knees buckle and I nearly fell, but Larry grabbed and held me. Then I recovered and stepped through the door.

  “Who’s this, Doctor?” said a policeman, moving to block my way.

  “Member of the family,” Larry said, speaking the truth. “Let him in.”

  There was nothing much in the room to add to, or subtract from, or explain the dead couple on the bed. I couldn’t bear to look at them any longer. For some reason I edged toward the phonograph, which had shut itself off, and glanced at the stack of records that Sophie and Nathan had played that afternoon. Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary, the Haydn cello concerto, part of the Pastoral Symphony, the lament for Eurydice from Gluck’s Orfeo—these were among the dozen or so of the shellac records I removed from the spindle. There were also two compositions whose titles had particular meaning for me, if only because of the meaning I knew they had possessed for Sophie and Nathan. One was the larghetto from the B-flat major piano concerto of Mozart—the last he wrote—and I had been with Sophie many times when she played it, stretched out on the bed with one arm flung over her eyes as the slow, sweet, tragic measures flooded the room. He was so close to the end of his life when he wrote it; was that the reaso
n (I remember her wondering aloud) why the music was filled with a resignation that was almost like joy? If she had ever been fortunate enough to have become a pianist, she went on, this would have been one of the first pieces she would have wished to commit to memory, mastering every shading of what she felt was its sound of “forever.” I knew almost nothing of Sophie’s history then, nor could I fully appreciate what, after a pause, she said about the piece: that she never heard it without thinking of children playing in the dusk, calling out in far, piping voices while the shadows of nightfall swooped down across some green and tranquil lawn.

  Two white-jacketed morgue attendants entered the room with a rustle of plastic bags. The other piece of music was one that both Sophie and Nathan had listened to all summer long. I don’t want to give it a larger connotation than it deserves, for Sophie and Nathan had fled faith. But the record had been on the top of the stack, and I could not help making this instinctive conjecture as I replaced it, assuming that in their final anguish—or ecstasy, or whatever engulfing revelation may have united them just before the darkness—the sound they heard was Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

  These final entries should be called, I suppose, something like “A Study in the Conquest of Grief.”

  We buried Sophie and Nathan side by side in a cemetery in Nassau County. It was less difficult to get organized than one might have imagined. Because there had been worries. After all, a Jew and a Catholic in a “suicide pact” (as the Daily News termed it, in a garishly illustrated story on page three), unmarried lovers dwelling in sin, suggestive beauty and good looks, the instigator of the tragedy a young man with a history of psychotic episodes, and so on—this was the stuff of superscandal in the year 1947. One could envision all sorts of objections to a double burial. But the ceremony was relatively easy to arrange (and Larry arranged it all) because there were no strict religious injunctions to observe. Nathan and Larry’s parents had been Orthodox Jews, but the mother was dead and the father, now in his eighties, was in precarious health and quite senile. Furthermore—and why not face it? we said—Sophie had no closer relative than Nathan. These considerations made it all the more reasonable for Larry to settle on the rites that were held that following Monday. Neither Larry nor Nathan had been inside a synagogue for years. And I told Larry, when he asked my advice, that I thought Sophie would not have wanted a priest or any ministrations of her church—perhaps a blasphemous assumption, and one that consigned Sophie to hell, but I was certain (and still am) that I was correct. In the afterlife Sophie would be able to endure any hell.