Sophie's Choice - William Styron [179]
“Then I heard Höss say, ‘Get to your feet! Demonstrations like this offend me. Get up!’ But when I began to get up his voice got softer and he said, ‘Certainly you may see your son, Sophie.’ I realized that it was the first time he ever spoke my name. Then—oh Jesus Christ, Stingo, he actually embraced me again and I heard him say, ‘Sophie, Sophie, certainly you may see your little boy.’ He said, ‘Do you think I could deny you that? Glaubst du, dass ich ein Ungeheuer bin? Do you think I am some kind of monster?’ ”
Chapter Eleven
“SON THE NORTH BELIEVES it has a veritable patent on virtue,” my father said, gingerly stroking with a forefinger his shiny new black eye. “But of course, the North is wrong. Do you think the slums of Harlem truly represent an advance for the Negro over a peanut patch in Southampton County? Do you think the Negro is going to remain content in that insufferable squalor? Son, someday the North is going to sadly rue these hypocritical attempts at magnanimity, these clever and transparent gestures that go by the name of tolerance. Someday—mark my word—it will be clearly demonstrated that the North is every bit as steeped in prejudice as the South, if not more so. At least in the South the prejudice is out in the open. But up here...” He paused to touch his sore eye again. “I really shudder to think of the violence and hatred building up in these slums.” An almost lifelong Southern liberal, conscious of the South’s injustices, my father had never been given to shifting unreasonably the various racial evils of the South onto the shoulders of the North; with some surprise, therefore, I listened to him attentively, unaware—during that summer of 1947—of just how prophetic his words were to prove.
At some time long past midnight we were sitting in the dim, murmurously convivial bar of the Hotel McAlpin, where I had taken him after the disastrous altercation he had had with a cabdriver named Thomas McGuire, Hack License 8608, only an hour or so after his arrival in New York. The old man (I use the phrase merely in the paternal-vernacular sense; at age fifty-nine he looked strappingly fit and youthful) had not been badly damaged but there had been a considerable uproar and a crimson outpouring of alarming, albeit harmlessly let, blood from a superficial cut on the brow. This had necessitated a small bandage. After order had been restored, and as we sat drinking (he bourbon, I that steadfast spirit of my nonage—Rheingold) and talking, largely about the gulf which separated this devil’s spawn of an urban blight north of the Chesapeake and the South’s Elysian meadows (in this realm my father could scarcely have been less prophetic, not having foreseen Atlanta), I was able more than once to reflect somberly on how my old man’s imbroglio with Thomas McGuire had at least allowed me momentary diversion from my newly acquired despair.
For, it may be recalled, all this would necessarily have taken place only brief hours after that moment in Brooklyn when I had assumed that Sophie and Nathan had disappeared from my life forever. Certainly I was convinced—since I had no reason to think otherwise—that I would never lay eyes on her again. And so the melancholy which had taken hold of me when I left Yetta Zimmerman’s and journeyed by subway to stay with my father in Manhattan had been as close to creating an excruciating physical malaise as any I had ever known—most surely since my mother’s death. It was now a thing of mingled bereavement and anxiety, inextricable and bewilderingly intense. The feelings alternated. Gazing out dully at the stroboscopic dazzle-and-dark of the subway tunnel lights streaking past, I felt the combined pain like an immense and oppressive weight thrusting down directly on my shoulders, so heavy that it somehow actually compressed my lungs and made my breath come in harsh erratic gasps. I did not—or could not—weep, but I halfway knew several times that I was on the verge of getting sick. It was as if I had been privy to sudden senseless death, as if Sophie (and Nathan too, for despite the rage, the resentful chagrin and confusion he had made me suffer, he was too intricately bound up in our triadic relationship for me to suddenly abandon the love and loyalty I felt for him) had been wiped out in one of those catastrophic traffic accidents which occur in an eyewink, leaving the survivors too stunned even to curse heaven. All I knew, as the train rumbled up through the dripping catacombs beneath Eighth Avenue, was that with an instantaneousness I still could barely believe, I had been cut off from the two people in life I cared the most about, and that the primitive sensation of loss it produced was causing me anguish similar to that of being buried alive under a ton of cinders.