Sophie's Choice - William Styron [297]
“Mmm, medium big. Not a huge metropolis like New York, but big enough. I would think about the size of Warsaw maybe, before the Nazis got to it. It was the first truly big city I ever saw in my life.”
“When was that?”
“Back around 1936, when I was eleven. I’d never been to the North before. And I remember the funniest damn story about the day I arrived. I had an aunt and uncle living in Philadelphia, and my mother—this was about two years before she died—decided to send me up here for a week’s visit in the summer. She sent me by myself, on a Greyhound bus. Little kids traveled alone a lot in those days, it was perfectly safe. Anyway, it was an all-day trip on the bus—it went the long way around from the Tidewater to Richmond, then up to Washington and through Baltimore. My mother had the colored cook—her name was Florence, I remember—fix me a big paper bag full of fried chicken and I had a thermos of cold milk—very gourmet travel cuisine, you understand, and I gobbled my lunch somewhere between Richmond and Washington, and then along about midafternoon the bus stopped in Havre de Grace—”
“Like the French, you mean?” Sophie said. “Harbor...”
“Yes, it’s a small town in Maryland. We’ll be going through it. Anyway, we all trooped out at a rest stop, a tacky little restaurant where you could take a pee and where they sold soda pop and such, and I saw this horse-racing machine. In Maryland, you see, unlike Virginia, they had a certain amount of legal gambling and you could put a nickel in this machine and bet on one of, oh, say a dozen tiny metal horses running down a track. I remember my mother had given me exactly four dollars spending money—that was a lot of money in the Depression—and I got very excited at the idea of betting on a horse, so I put in my nickel. Well, Sophie, you can’t imagine. That goddamned machine hit the jackpot—you know what jackpot means? Everything lit up and out came an absolute torrent of nickels—dozens of them, scores of them. I couldn’t believe it! I must have won fifteen dollars’ worth of nickels. They were all over the floor. I was out of my mind with happiness. But the problem was, you see, how to transport all this loot. I remember I was wearing these little white linen short pants and I stuffed all these nickels into the pockets, but even so, there were so many of them that they just kept spilling out all over everywhere. And the worst part was this: there was this mean-looking woman who ran the place, and when I asked her to please exchange my nickels for dollar bills she flew into a terrible rage, screaming at me that you had to be eighteen to play the horse-race machine and that I was obviously still wet behind the ears and that she’d lose her license and if I didn’t get the hell out of there, she’d call the police.”
“You were eleven,” said Sophie, taking my hand. “I can’t believe Stingo at eleven. You must have been a cute little boy in your white linen short pants.” Sophie was still pink-nosed, but the tears had momentarily stopped and in her eyes I thought I saw a sparkle of something like amusement.
“So I got back on this bus for the rest of the drive to Philadelphia. It was a long way. Every time I made the slightest move a nickel or several of them would slip out of these bulging pockets of mine and roll down the aisle. And when I’d get up to retrieve them it would make it only worse, because more nickels would fall out and roll away. The driver was half crazy by the time we got to Wilmington and all through the trip the passengers were looking down at this trickle of money.” I paused, gazing out at the faceless shadow figures on the station platform, which moved away in soundless retrograde as the train pulled out now, gently vibrating. “Anyway,” I said, returning the squeeze Sophie gave my hand, “the final tragedy happened at the bus station, which must be not far from here. That evening my aunt and uncle were waiting for me and when I ran toward them I tripped and fell down flat on my little ass, my pockets split, and almost every