Sophie's Choice - William Styron [199]
“I’m sorry I took so long, Stingo,” she said as she sat down beside me. After the chronicle of the afternoon it was hard to believe she was so cheerful. “In the bathroom I met an old Russian bohémienne—a, you know, diseuse de bonne aventure.”
“What?” I said. “Oh, you mean a fortuneteller.” I had seen the old hag in the bar several times before, one of Brooklyn’s myriad Gypsy hustlers.
“Yes, she read my palm,” she said brightly. “She spoke to me in Russian. And do you know what? She said this. She said, ‘You have had recent bad fortune. It concerns a man. An unhappy love. But do not fear. Everything will turn out well.’ Isn’t that wonderful, Stingo? Isn’t that just great?”
It was my feeling then, as it is now, and forgive the sexism, that the most rational-seeming females are pushovers for such harmlessly occult frissons, but I let it slide and said nothing; the augury seemed to give Sophie great joy and I could not help but start to share her sunny mood. (But what could it mean? I worried. Nathan was gone.) However, the Maple Court began to vibrate with unhealthy shadows, I yearned for the sun, and when I suggested that we take a stroll in the late-afternoon air she quickly agreed.
The storm had washed Flatbush sparkling clean. Lightning had struck somewhere nearby; there was a smell in the street of ozone, eclipsing even the fragrance of sauerkraut and bagels. My eyelids felt gritty. I blinked painfully in the blinding glare; after Sophie’s dark memories and the Maple Court’s crepuscular murk, the bourgeois blocks rimming Prospect Park seemed dazzling, ethereal, almost Mediterranean, like a flat leafy Athens. We walked to the corner of the Parade Grounds and watched the kids playing baseball in the sandlots. Overhead the droning airplane with its trailing banner, ubiquitous that Brooklyn summer against cloud-streaked ultramarine, advertised more nightly thrills at the hippodrome of Aqueduct. For a long while we squatted in a patch of weedy, rain-damp, rank-smelling grass while I explained to Sophie the mechanics of baseball; she was a serious student, sweetly engaged, her eyes attentive. I found myself so caught up in my own didactic spell that at last all the doubts and wonderments about Sophie’s past that had lingered there since her recent long recital scattered from my mind, even the most dreadful and mysterious uncertainty: what had finally happened to her little boy?
The question came back to trouble me as we walked the short block to Yetta’s house. I wondered if the story of Jan was something she could ever reveal. But this perplexity soon went away. I was dogged by another concern: I had begun to fret powerfully inside over Sophie herself. And the pain intensified when she mentioned again that she would be leaving tonight for her new apartment. Tonight! It was all too clear that “tonight” meant right now.
“I’m going to miss you, Sophie,” I blurted as we clumped up the Pink Palace’s front steps. I was conscious of the loutish vibrato in my voice, pitched just this side of desperation. “I’m really going to miss you!”
“Oh, we’ll be seeing each other, don’t worry, Stingo. We really will! After all, I’m not going too far away. I’m still going to be in Broooklyn.” The shading of her words brought some reassurance, but of a fragile and anemic sort; it bespoke loyalty and a kind of lovingness and a desire—even a resolute desire—to maintain old ties. But it fell short of that emotion that brings cries and whispers. Affection for me she had—of that I was sure—but passion, no. About which I could say that I had harbored hope but no wild illusions.
“We’ll have dinner together a lot,” she said while I trailed her upstairs to the second floor. “Don