Sophie's Choice - William Styron [296]
“Okay, Stingo,” she said, taking my hand. “I’ll do whatever you say.” After a silence she said, “Stingo, would you go get me some water?”
“Sure.” I pressed down the aisle crowded with people, mostly servicemen, and near the vestibule found the fountain, where I trickled warm unsavory-looking water into a paper cup. When I returned, still airily elated by my fanciful pipe dreams, my spirits sank like pig iron at the sight of Sophie clutching a full pint bottle of Four Roses which she had plucked from her suitcase.
“Sophie,” I said gently, “for God’s sake, it’s morning still. You haven’t even had breakfast. You’re going to get cirrhosis of the liver.”
“That’s all right,” she said, sloshing whiskey into the cup. “I had a doughnut at the station. And a Seven-Up.”
I groaned softly, aware from past experience that there was no way of dealing with this problem short of complicating matters and creating a scene. The most I could hope for would be to catch her off guard and swipe the bottle, as I had done once or twice before. I sank back in my seat. The train sped across New Jersey’s satanic industrial barrens, the clickety-clack momentum hurling us past squalid slums, sheet-metal sheds, goofy drive-ins with whirling signs, warehouses, bowling alleys built like crematoriums, crematoriums built like roller rinks, swamps of green chemical slime, parking lots, barbarous oil refineries with their spindly upright nozzles ejaculating flame and mustard-yellow fumes. What would Thomas Jefferson have thought, viewing this? I mused. Sophie, jittery, restless, alternately gazed out at this landscape and poured whiskey into her cup, finally turning to me to say, “Stingo, does this train stop anywhere between here and Washington?”
“Only for a minute or two to take on passengers or let them off. Why?”
“I want to make a telephone call.”
“Who to?”
“I want to call and find out about Nathan. I want to see if he’s all right.”
Ogreish gloom encompassed me in recapitulation of the agony of the night before. I took Sophie’s arm and squeezed it hard, too hard; she winced. “Sophie,” I said, “listen. Listen to me. That part is over. There is nothing you can do. Can’t you realize that he actually was on the point of killing us both? Larry will come down from Toronto and locate Nathan and—well, deal with him. After all, he’s his brother, his closest relative. Nathan is insane, Sophie! He’s got to be... institutionalized.”
She had begun to weep. The tears spilled down around her fingers, which suddenly looked very thin, pink and emaciated as she clutched her cup. And once again I was conscious of that pitiless blue toothbite of a tattoo on her forearm. “I just don’t know how I’m going to face things, I mean, without him.” She paused, sobbing. “I could call Larry.”
“You couldn’t reach him now,” I insisted, “he must be on a train somewhere near Buffalo.”
“Then I could call Morris Fink. He might be able to tell me if Nathan came back to the house. Sometimes, you know, he would do that when he was on a high. He would come back and take some Nembutal and sleep it off. Then when he woke up he would be all right. Or almost all right. Morris would know if he did that this time.” She blew her nose, continuing to make little hiccupy sobs.
“Oh, Sophie, Sophie,” I whispered, wanting to say but unable to say, “It’s all over.”
Thundering into the station in Philadelphia, the train screeched and shuddered to a stop amid the sunless cavern, touching me with a pang of nostalgia I could scarcely have foreseen. In the window I caught a glimpse of my reflected face, pale from too much indoor literary endeavor, and behind that face I thought for an instant I saw a younger replica—my little-boy self over ten years before. I laughed out loud at the remembrance, and suddenly invigorated and inspired, resolved both to distract Sophie from her gathering disquiet and to cheer her up, or try to.
“This is Philadelphia,” I said.
“Is it a big place?” she asked.