Sophie's Choice - William Styron [192]
Guilt. Lying there, I realized that as a boy my father had never punished me severely except once—and then only because of a crime for which I sublimely deserved reprisal. It had to do with my mother. In the year before she died, when I was twelve, the cancer which had been devouring my mother began to filter into her bones. One day her weakened leg gave way; she fell and broke the lower bone, the tibia, which never mended. Thereafter she had to wear a brace and walked haltingly with a cane. She disliked lying in bed and preferred to sit when she could. Whenever she sat it was with her leg outstretched in its brace, propped on a stool or an ottoman. She was then only fifty, and I was aware that she knew she was going to die; I sometimes saw the fear. My mother read books incessantly—books were her narcotic until that time when the intolerable pain began and real narcotics replaced Pearl Buck—and my strongest memory of her during that last period of her life is of the gray head above the gentle, bespectacled, wasting face bent over You Can’t Go Home Again (she had been a devoted fan long before I had read a word of Wolfe, but she also read best sellers with ornate titles—Dust Be My Destiny, The Sun Is My Undoing), a portrait of absorbed and placid contemplation and as domestically commonplace in her way as a study by Vermeer, save for the wicked metal brace propped on its footstool. I also remember a certain venerable frayed and patterned afghan which in cold weather she used to cover her lap and the imprisoned leg. Truly low temperatures almost never beset that part of the Virginia Tidewater but it could become briefly, achingly cold in the nasty months, and because it came rarely, the cold always surprised. In our tiny house we had a weak coal-burning furnace in the kitchen, supplemented in the living room by a toy fireplace.
It was on a sofa in front of this fireplace that my mother lay reading on winter afternoons. As an only child, I was classically though not immoderately spoiled; one of the few chores demanded of me, on afternoons after school during the winter months, was that I hurry home and see to it that the fireplace was well fueled, since although my mother was not yet totally incapacitated, it was far beyond her strength to throw wood on a fire. There was a telephone, but in an adjoining room, down steps she could not negotiate. Already it must be easy to guess the nature of the outrage I committed: one afternoon I abandoned her. I was lured away by the promise of a ride with a schoolmate and his grown-up brother in a new Packard Clipper, one of the swank cars of the day. I was mad for that car. I was drunk with its vulgar elegance. We streaked with idiot vainglory through the frosty countryside, and as the afternoon faded and evening fell, so did the mercury; at about five o’clock the Clipper halted somewhere far from home out in the pinewoods and I became aware of the sudden descent of windy, vicious cold. And for the first time I thought of the hearth, and my deserted mother, and became sick with alarm. Jesus Christ, guilt...
Ten years later, lying in bed on the fifth floor of the McAlpin and listening to my father snore,