Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  Thundering into the station in Philadelphia, the train screeched and shuddered to a stop amid the sunless cavern, touching me with a pang of nostalgia I could scarcely have foreseen. In the window I caught a glimpse of my reflected face, pale from too much indoor literary endeavor, and behind that face I thought for an instant I saw a younger replica—my little-boy self over ten years before. I laughed out loud at the remembrance, and suddenly invigorated and inspired, resolved both to distract Sophie from her gathering disquiet and to cheer her up, or try to.

  “This is Philadelphia,” I said.

  “Is it a big place?” she asked. Her curiosity, though lachrymal, encouraged me.

  “Mmm, medium big. Not a huge metropolis like New York, but big enough. I would think about the size of Warsaw maybe, before the Nazis got to it. It was the first truly big city I ever saw in my life.”

  “When was that?”

  “Back around 1936, when I was eleven. I’d never been to the North before. And I remember the funniest damn story about the day I arrived. I had an aunt and uncle living in Philadelphia, and my mother—this was about two years before she died—decided to send me up here for a week’s visit in the summer. She sent me by myself, on a Greyhound bus. Little kids traveled alone a lot in those days, it was perfectly safe. Anyway, it was an all-day trip on the bus—it went the long way around from the Tidewater to Richmond, then up to Washington and through Baltimore. My mother had the colored cook—her name was Florence, I remember—fix me a big paper bag full of fried chicken and I had a thermos of cold milk—very gourmet travel cuisine, you understand, and I gobbled my lunch somewhere between Richmond and Washington, and then along about midafternoon the bus stopped in Havre de Grace—”

  “Like the French, you mean?” Sophie said. “Harbor...”

  “Yes, it’s a small town in Maryland. We’ll be going through it. Anyway, we all trooped out at a rest stop, a tacky little restaurant where you could take a pee and where they sold soda pop and such, and I saw this horse-racing machine. In Maryland, you see, unlike Virginia, they had a certain amount of legal gambling and you could put a nickel in this machine and bet on one of, oh, say a dozen tiny metal horses running down a track. I remember my mother had given me exactly four dollars spending money—that was a lot of money in the Depression—and I got very excited at the idea of betting on a horse, so I put in my nickel. Well, Sophie, you can’t imagine. That goddamned machine hit the jackpot—you know what jackpot means? Everything lit up and out came an absolute torrent of nickels—dozens of them, scores of them. I couldn’t believe it! I must have won fifteen dollars’ worth of nickels. They were all over the floor. I was out of my mind with happiness. But the problem was, you see, how to transport all this loot. I remember I was wearing these little white linen short pants and I stuffed all these nickels into the pockets, but even so, there were so many of them that they just kept spilling out all over everywhere. And the worst part was this: there was this mean-looking woman who ran the place, and when I asked her to please exchange my nickels for dollar bills she flew into a terrible rage, screaming at me that you had to be eighteen to play the horse-race machine and that I was obviously still wet behind the ears and that she’d lose her license and if I didn’t get the hell out of there, she’d call the police.”

  “You were eleven,” said Sophie, taking my hand. “I can’t believe Stingo at eleven. You must have been a cute little boy in your white linen short pants.” Sophie was still pink-nosed, but the tears had momentarily stopped and in her eyes I thought I saw a sparkle of something like amusement.

  “So I got back on this bus for the rest of the drive to Philadelphia. It was a long way. Every time I made the slightest move a nickel or several of them would slip out of these bulging pockets of mine and roll down the aisle. And when I’d get up to retrieve them it would make it only worse, because more nickels would fall out and roll away. The driver was half crazy by the time we got to Wilmington and all through the trip the passengers were looking down at this trickle of money.” I paused, gazing out at the faceless shadow figures on the station platform, which moved away in soundless retrograde as the train pulled out now, gently vibrating. “Anyway,” I said, returning the squeeze Sophie gave my hand, “the final tragedy happened at the bus station, which must be not far from here. That evening my aunt and uncle were waiting for me and when I ran toward them I tripped and fell down flat on my little ass, my pockets split, and almost every goddamned one of those nickels poured out off the ramp and underneath the buses into this dark parking bay far down below, and I think when my uncle picked me up and brushed me off, there were about five nickels left in my pockets. The others were gone forever.” I halted, tickled at this sweetly absurd fable which I had told Sophie truthfully, with no need for embroidery. “It is a cautionary tale,” I added, “about the destructive nature of greed.”

  Sophie held one hand to her face, obscuring her expression, but since her shoulders were trembling I thought she had succumbed to laughter. I was mistaken. There were tears again, tears of anguish from which she simply could not seem to free herself. Suddenly I realized that I must have inadvertently summoned up memories of her little boy. I let her cry in silence for a while. Then the weeping became less. Finally she turned to me and said, “Down in Virginia where we’re going, Stingo, do you think there will be a Berlitz school, a school for language?”

  “What on earth would you want that for?” I said. “You already know more languages than anyone I know.”

  “It would be for English,” she replied. “Oh, I know I speak it good now, and even read it, but what I must learn to do is to write it. I’m so poor at writing English. The spelling is so very strange.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Sophie,” I said, “there are probably language schools in Richmond or Norfolk. But they are both pretty far away from Southampton. Why do you ask?”

  “I want to write about Auschwitz,” she said, “I want to write about my experiences there. I suppose I could write in Polish or German or maybe French, but I’d so much rather be able to write in English...”

  Auschwitz. It was a place which, amid the events of the past few days, I had thrust so far in the back of my mind that I had almost forgotten its existence; now it returned like a blow at the back of my skull, and it hurt. I looked at Sophie as she took a swig from her cup and then gave a small burp. Her speech had taken on the swollen-tongued quality which I had learned was a presentiment of unruly thinking and difficult behavior. I longed to dump that cup on the floor. And I cursed myself for the weakness or indecisiveness or spinelessness, or whatever it was, that still prevented my dealing more firmly with Sophie at such moments. Wait until we’re married, I thought.

  “There are so many things that people still don’t know about that place!” she said fiercely. “There are so many things I haven’t even told you, Stingo, and I’ve told you so much. You know, about how the whole place was covered with the smell of burning Jews, day and night. I’ve told you that. But I never even told you hardly anything about Birkenau, when they begun to starve me to death and I got so sick I almost died. Or about the time I saw a guard take the clothes off a nun and then make his dog attack her and bite her so bad on the body and the face that she died a few hours later. Or...” And here she paused, gazed into space, then said, “There are so many terrible things I could tell. But maybe I could write it as a novel, you see, if I learned to write English good, and then I could make people understood how the Nazis made you do things you never believed you could. Like Höss, for instance. I never would have tried to make him fuck me if it hadn’t been for Jan. And I never would have pretended that I hated Jews so much, or that I wrote my father’s pamphlet. All that was for Jan. And that radio that I didn’t take. It still almost kills me that I didn’t steal it, but don’t you see, Stingo, how that would have ruined everything for my little boy? And at that same time I just couldn’t open my mouth, just couldn’t report to the Resistance people, couldn’t say a word abou
t all the things I’d learned working for Höss, because I was afraid...” She faltered. Her hands were trembling. “I was so afraid! They made me afraid of everything! Why don’t I tell the truth about myself? Why don’t I write it down in a book that I was a terrible coward, that I was a filthy collaboratrice, that I done everything that was bad just to save myself?” She made a savage moan, so loud above the racket of the train that heads turned nearby and eyes rolled. “Oh, Stingo, I can’t stand living with these things!”

  “Hush, Sophie!” I commanded. “You know you weren’t a collaborator. You’re contradicting yourself! You know you were just a victim. You told me yourself this summer that a place like that camp made you behave in a different way than in the ordinary world. You told me yourself that you just couldn’t judge what you did or what anyone else did in terms of accepted conduct. So please, Sophie, please, please leave yourself alone! You’re just eating your guts out about things that weren’t your fault—and it’s going to make you ill! Please stop it.” I lowered my voice, and I used a word of endearment I had never used before, the word itself surprising me. “Please stop this now, darling, for your own sake.” It sounded pompous with the “darling”—already I was talking in a husbandly way—but I somehow had to say it.

  I was also on the verge of speaking those words which had been on my tongue a hundred times that summer—“I love you, Sophie.” The prospect of uttering that plain phrase made my heart pound and skip beats, but before I could open my mouth Sophie announced that she had to go to the bathroom. She finished off the cup before she went. I watched anxiously as she began to shove her way toward the rear of the car, the blond head bobbing, the pretty legs unsteady. Then I turned back to reading Life magazine. I must have dozed off then, or rather, slept, sunk as if drowned after the exhaustion of a wide-awake night and its tension and chaos, for when the conductor’s nearby voice woke me by bellowing “All aboard!” I jumped straight up out of my seat and then realized that an hour or more had passed. Sophie had not returned to her place next to me, and sudden fear wrapped itself around me like a quilt fashioned of many wet hands. I glanced into the darkness outside, saw the passing sparkle of tunnel lights, and knew that we were leaving Baltimore. It might have been a normal two-minute struggle to the other end of the car, pressing and shoving past the bellies and rumps of fifty standees, but I made it in a few seconds, actually knocking a small child down. In senseless dread I pounded at the door of the women’s lavatory—what made me think she was still in there? A fat Negro woman with wild wiglike hair and bright marigold powder on her jowls stuck her face out and shrilled, “Git outa here! You crazy?” I plunged on.

  In the swanker regions of the train I was enveloped by moist Muzak. The elderly-auntie strains of Percy Grainger’s Country Gardens followed me as I frantically peered into roomette after roomette, hoping that Sophie had strayed into one and perhaps gone to sleep. I was now alternately obsessed by the notion that she had gotten off in Baltimore and that—Oh shit, the other was even more unthinkable. I opened the doors of more lavatories, stalked the funereal plush reaches of four or five parlor cars, hopefully scanned the diner where white-aproned colored waiters flapped their way up and down the aisle through fumes fragrant with stale cooking oil. At last: the club car. A little desk, a cash register—its custodian a pleasant gray-haired middle-aged woman who gazed up from her work with mournful eyes.

  “Yes, poor dear,” she said after I had blurted the queasy question, “she was hunting for a telephone. Imagine, on a train! She wanted to call Brooklyn. Poor dear, she was crying. She seemed, well, a little drunk. She went that way.”

  I found Sophie at the end of the car, which was a bleak cage of a vestibule, clangingly noisy, that was also the end of the train. A padlocked glass door crisscrossed by wire mesh looked down on the receding rails that glittered in the late-morning sun and converged at a point marking infinity amid the green pinewoods of Maryland. She was sitting on the floor slumped against the wall, her yellow hair adrift in the windy draft, and in one hand she clutched the bottle. As in that swim to oblivion weeks before—when exhaustion had so unmanned her, and guilt, and grief—she had gone as far as she could go. She gazed up and said something to me, but I couldn’t hear. I bent down closer, and now—partly reading her lips, partly responding to that infinitely sorrowful voice—heard her say, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

  Hotel employees certainly must come face to face with a lot of weird ones. But I still wonder what went through the mind of the grandfatherly desk clerk at the Hotel Congress, not far from our nation’s Capitol, when he confronted the young Reverend Wilbur Entwistle, wearing a distinctly unecclesiastical seersucker suit but conspicuously carrying a Bible, and his violently rumpled fair-haired wife, who muttered disconnectedly in a foreign accent during the registration process, her face potty with train soot and tears, and clearly blotto. In the end he doubtless took it in his stride, for I had worked out a camouflage. Despite my informal dress, the masquerade I had contrived seemed as effective as one could imagine. In the 1940s unmarried people were not permitted to check into the same hotel room together; in addition, it was a felonious risk to falsely register as man and wife. The hazard increased if the lady was drunk. Desperate, I knew I was taking a risk, but it was one that seemed minimized if I could cast over it a modest halo of sanctimony. Therefore, there was the black leather Bible which I fished out of my suitcase just before the train pulled into Union Station, and also there was the address I inscribed in a large hand on the register, as if to decisively validate my dulcet-voiced and unguentary ministerial bearing: Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. I was relieved to see that my ruse served to distract the clerk’s attention from Sophie; the dewlapped old gentleman, being Southern (like so many Washington hirelings), was impressed by my credentials and also had a Southerner’s genial garrulousness: “Have a nice stay, Reverend, you and the missus. What denomination you a preacher in?”

  I was about to reply “Presbyterian,” but he had begun to ramble on like a beagle hound softly barking down the ravines of godly fellowship. “Me, I’m a Baptist, fifteen years I’ve attended the Second Baptist Church of Washington, mighty fine preacher we’ve got there now, Reverend Wilcox, maybe you’ve heard of him. Comes from Fluvanna County, Virginia, where I was born and raised, though of course he’s a much younger man.” As I began to edge away, with Sophie clinging heavily to my arm, the clerk rang for the single sleepy Negro bellboy and handed me a card. “You like good seafood, Reverend? Try this restaurant down on the waterfront. It’s called Herzog’s. Best crab cakes in town.” And when we approached the aged elevator with its stained pea-green doors, he persisted: “Entwistle. You wouldn’t be related to the Entwistles down around Powhatan County, would you, Reverend?” I was back in the South.

  The Hotel Congress breathed an air of troisième classe. The cubbyhole of a room we took for seven dollars was drab and stifling, and its exposure on a nondescript back street let in feeble light from the midday sun. Sophie, wobbling and desperate for sleep, plunged onto the bed even before the bellboy had deposited our bags on a rickety stand and accepted my twenty-five cents. I opened a window upon a ledge calcimine with pigeon droppings, and a warm October breeze suddenly freshened the room. Far off I could hear the clangor and muffled hoots of the trains at Union Station, while from some nearer source there came ruffles and flourishes, trumpets, cymbals, the piping self-esteem of a military band. A couple of flies made a bloated buzzing in the shadows near the ceiling.

  I lay down next to Sophie on the bed, which had become unsprung in the middle, not so much allowing me as forcing me to roll toward her, as in the bosom of some shallow hammock, and on top of threadbare bedclothes that exuded a faint musky chlorinated smell either of laundry bleach or semen, perhaps both. Almost total exhaustion and worry over Sophie’s condition had dampened the cruder urgencies of the desire I had continually felt for her, but the fragrance and slope of the bed—seminal, erotic, saggi
ng with ten thousand fornications—and her simple touch and proximity made me stir, squirm, fidget, unable to sleep. I heard a distant bell chime the noon hour. Sophie slept against me with lips apart, her breath faintly odorous of whiskey. The low-cut silk dress she wore had allowed most of one breast to become exposed, causing me such an irresistible hunger to touch it that I did just that, stroking the blue-veined skin at first lightly with my fingertips, then beginning to press and fondle the creamy fullness more elaborately with palm and thumb. The seizure of pure lust which accompanied this tender manipulation was accompanied in turn by a twinge of shame; there was something sneaky, almost necrophiliac in the act; molesting even the epidermal surface of Sophie in the privacy of her drugged slumber—and so I stopped, withdrew my hand.

  Still I could not sleep. My brain swam with images, sounds, voices, the past and the future trading places, sometimes commingled: Nathan’s howl of rage, so cruel and mad that I had to thrust it from my thoughts; recently written scenes from my novel, the characters babbling their dialogue in my ear like actors on a stage; my father’s voice on the telephone, generous, welcoming (was the old man not right? shouldn’t I now make the South forever my home?); Sophie on the mossy shore of some imaginary pond or pool deep within the woods beyond “Five Elms’ ” spring fields, her lithe restored body glorious and long-legged in a Lastex bathing suit, our grinning elf of a first-born perched on her knee; that hideous gunshot swarming in my ear; sunsets, abandoned love-crazed midnights, magnanimous dawns, vanished children, triumph, grief, Mozart, rain, September green, repose, death. Love. The distant band, fading away on the “Colonel Bogey March,” made me ache with a hungry nostalgia and I recalled the war years not so long before, when on leave from some camp in Carolina or Virginia, I would lie awake (womanless) in a hotel in this same city—one of the few American cities stalked by the revenants of history—and think of the streets below and how they must have looked only three-quarters of a century ago, in the midst of the most grief-blasted war that ever set brother to murdering brother, when the sidewalks teemed with soldiers in blue and with gamblers and whores, sharp swindlers in stovepipe hats, splashy Zouaves, hustling journalists, businessmen on the make, pretty flirts in flowered hats, shadowy Confederate spies, pickpockets and coffin-makers—these last ever-hurrying to their ceaseless labor, awaiting those tens of thousands of martyrs, mostly boys, who were being slaughtered on the desperate earth south of the Potomac and who lay piled up like cordwood thick in the bloody fields and woods just beyond that sleeping river. It was always strange to me—awesome even—that the cleanly modern capital of Washington, so impersonal and official in its expansive beauty, should be one of the few cities in the nation disturbed by authentic ghosts. The band vanished into the far distance, its brazen diminishing harmony soft, heartbreaking on my hearing like a lullaby. I slept.