Sophie's Choice - William Styron [205]
The only thorn in this bower of roses, Sophie told me, was her employment. That is, the fact that she continued to work for Dr. Hyman Blackstock, who, after all, was a chiropractor. To Nathan, brother of a first-rate doctor, a young man who considered himself a dedicated scientist (and for whom the canons of medical ethics were as sacred as if he himself had taken the Hippocratic oath), the idea of her laboring in the employ of a quack was nearly intolerable. He told her point-blank that in his view it was tantamount to whoring and he implored her to quit. To be sure, for a long time he made an extended joke out of it all, concocting all sorts of gags and stories about chiropractors and their shoddy craft that caused her to laugh despite herself; the general facetiousness of his attitude allowed her to decide that his objections were not to be taken too seriously. Even so, when his complaints grew louder and his animadversions more serious and cutting, she steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of leaving her job, as uncomfortable as the whole situation seemed to make Nathan feel. It was one of the few tangents in their relationship where she felt unable to adopt a subservient point of view. And she was firm about the matter. After all, she was not married to Nathan. She had to feel a certain independence. She had to remain employed in that year when employment was devilishly difficult to come by, especially for a young woman who (as she kept pointing out to Nathan) had “no talents.” Furthermore, she felt very secure in this job where she could speak in her native tongue to the boss, and she had frankly grown quite fond of Blackstock. He was like a godfather or beloved uncle to her and she made no bones about the fact. Alas, she came to realize that it was this perfectly innocuous fondness, containing no romantic overtone whatever, that Nathan misconstrued, adding fuel to his seething animosity. It would perhaps have been faintly comic had not his misplaced jealousy contained seeds of the violent, and worse...
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