Sophie's Choice - William Styron [260]
“What was it playing?” I said.
“It was the overture to this operetta of Franz Lehár,” she gasped, “Das Land des Lächelns—The Land of Smiles.”
It was well past midnight when we strolled the short blocks home to the Pink Palace. Sophie was calm now. No one was abroad in the balmy darkness, and along the maple-lined summer streets the houses of the good burghers of Flatbush were lightless and hushed with slumber. Walking next to me, Sophie wound her arm around my waist and her perfume momentarily stung my senses, but I understood the gesture by now to be merely sisterly or friendly, and besides, her long recital had left me far beyond any stirrings of desire. Gloom and despondency hung over me like the August darkness itself and I wondered idly if I would be able to sleep.
Approaching Mrs. Zimmerman’s stronghold, where a night light glowed dimly in the pink hallway, we stumbled slightly on the rough sidewalk and Sophie spoke for the first time since we had left the bar. “Have you got an alarm clock, Stingo? I’ve got to get up so early tomorrow, to move my things into my new place and then get to work on time. Dr. Blackstock has been very patient with me during these past few days, but I really must get back to work. Why don’t you call me during the middle of the week?” I heard her stifle a yawn.
I was about to make a reply about the alarm clock when a shadow, dark gray, detached itself from the blacker shadows surrounding the front porch of the house. My heart made a bad beat and I said, “Oh my God.” It was Nathan. I uttered his name in a whisper just as Sophie recognized him too and gave a soft moan. For an instant I had the, I suppose, reasonable idea that he was going to attack us. But then I heard Nathan call out gently, “Sophie,” and she disengaged her arm from my waist with such haste that my shirttail was pulled out of my trousers’ waistband. I halted and stood quite still as they plunged toward each other through the chiaroscuro of dimly trembling, leafy light, and I heard the sobbing sounds that Sophie made just before they collided and embraced. For long moments they clung together, merged into each other amid the late-summer darkness. Then at last I saw Nathan slowly sink to his knees on the hard pavement, where, surrounding Sophie’s legs with his arms, he remained motionless for what seemed an interminable time, frozen in an attitude of devotion, or fealty, or penance, or supplication—or all of these.
Chapter Fourteen
NATHAN RECAPTURED US easily, not a minute too soon.
After our remarkably sweet and easy reconciliation—Sophie and Nathan and Stingo—one of the first things that I remember happening was this: Nathan gave me two hundred dollars. Two days after their happy reunion, after Nathan had reestablished himself with Sophie on the floor above and I had ensconced myself once more in my primrose-hued quarters, Nathan learned from Sophie the fact that I had been robbed. (Morris Fink, incidentally, had not been the culprit. Nathan noticed that my bathroom window had been forced—something Morris would not have had to do. I was ashamed of my nasty suspicion.) The next afternoon, returning from lunch at a delicatessen on Ocean Avenue, I found on my desk his check made out to me for that sum which in 1947, to a person in my state of virtual destitution, can only be described as, well, imperial. Clipped to the check was the handwritten note: To the greater glory of Southern Literature. I was flabbergasted. Naturally, the money was a godsend, bailing me out at a moment when I was frantic with worry over the immediate future. It was next to impossible to turn it down. But my various religious and ancestral scruples forbade my accepting it as a gift.