Sophie's Choice - William Styron [196]
Earlier there was a bizarre, peripheral tragedy affecting Sophie which should be recounted here if only because of the way in which it elaborates all the foregoing. It has to do with Blackstock’s wife, Sylvia, and the fact that she was a “problem drinker”; the horrible event itself occurred about four months after Sophie and Nathan began keeping company, in the early fall...
“I knew knee-deep she was a problem drinker,” Black-stock later told Sophie in his desperate lament, “but I had no idea how great was her problem.” He confessed with wrenching guilt to a certain willful blindness: coming home night after night to St. Albans from his office he would try to ignore her slurred speech after the single cocktail, usually a Manhattan, which he served both of them, attributing her addled tongue and unsteady gait to a simple intolerance of alcohol. But even so, he knew he was fooling himself, in his desperate love for her shrinking from the truth that was revealed in graphic figuration a few days after her death. Stuffed into a closet in her private dressing room—a sanctum never penetrated by Blackstock—were over seventy empty quart bottles of Southern Comfort, which the poor woman apparently dreaded to risk disposing of, although she plainly had no trouble acquiring the powerful sweet elixir and stowing it away by the case. Blackstock realized—or allowed himself to realize—only when it was too late that this had been going on for months, maybe years. “If only I hadn’t pampered her so,” he grieved to Sophie. “If only I had faced up to the fact that she was a—” he hesitated at the word—“a lush. I could have put her into psychoanalytical therapy, had her cured.” His recriminations were terrible to hear. “It’s my fault, all mine!” he wept. And chief among his assemblage of griefs was this: that basically aware of her awful plight, he had still permitted her to drive an automobile.
Sylvia was his precious pet, and that is what he called her. My pet. He had no one else to really squander his money on, and so, instead of voicing the standard husband’s complaint, he actually encouraged her frequent buying sprees to Manhattan. There with some female friend—flush, plump and idle like herself—she would sweep through Altman and Bergdorf and Bonwit and half a dozen other fancy shops and return to Queens with the back seat stacked high with boxes of ladies’ merchandise, most of which languished in pristine condition in her bureau drawers or got stuffed into the recesses of her many closets, where Blackstock later found score upon score of unused gowns and dresses faintly smudged with mildew. What Blackstock did not know until the sad fact was past undoing was that after her orgy of shopping she usually got drunk with her companion of the day; she favored the lounge of the Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue where the bartender was friendly, indulgent and discreet But her ability to cope with the Southern Comfort—which even at the Westbury remained her steady tipple—was being swiftly undermined, and the disaster when it struck was sudden, terrifying and, as I say, almost indecently bizarre.
Returning to St. Albans one afternoon by way of the Triborough Bridge, she lost control of the car while driving at ferocious speed (the police said that the speedometer was frozen at eighty-five miles an hour), smashed into the rear end of a truck and spun out against the guardrail of the bridge, where the Chrysler was instantly transmuted into steel splinters and plastic shards. Sylvia’s friend, a Mrs. Braunstein, died three hours later in a hospital. Sylvia herself was decapitated, which in itself was ghastly enough; it was intolerable that to Blackstock