Sophie's Choice - William Styron [188]
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.
“I admire your spunk tremendously,” my father had said while we ate a late dinner at a Schrafft’s. “The seventy-two hours I plan to spend in this burg is about all most mortal men from civilized parts can stand. I don’t know how you do it. Your youth, I suppose, that wonderful flexibility of your age that allows you to be beguiled by, rather than devoured by, this octopus of a city. I’ve never been there, but really, is it possibly true that, as you wrote me, there are parts of Brooklyn that remind one of Richmond?”
Despite the long train ride up from the depths of the Tidewater my father was in a splendid mood, which helped me take my mind off my spiritual disarray, at least fitfully. He