Sophie's Choice - William Styron [299]
“Hush, Sophie!” I commanded. “You know you weren’t a collaborator. You’re contradicting yourself! You know you were just a victim. You told me yourself this summer that a place like that camp made you behave in a different way than in the ordinary world. You told me yourself that you just couldn’t judge what you did or what anyone else did in terms of accepted conduct. So please, Sophie, please, please leave yourself alone! You’re just eating your guts out about things that weren’t your fault—and it’s going to make you ill! Please stop it.” I lowered my voice, and I used a word of endearment I had never used before, the word itself surprising me. “Please stop this now, darling, for your own sake.” It sounded pompous with the “darling”—already I was talking in a husbandly way—but I somehow had to say it.
I was also on the verge of speaking those words which had been on my tongue a hundred times that summer—“I love you, Sophie.” The prospect of uttering that plain phrase made my heart pound and skip beats, but before I could open my mouth Sophie announced that she had to go to the bathroom. She finished off the cup before she went. I watched anxiously as she began to shove her way toward the rear of the car, the blond head bobbing, the pretty legs unsteady. Then I turned back to reading Life magazine. I must have dozed off then, or rather, slept, sunk as if drowned after the exhaustion of a wide-awake night and its tension and chaos, for when the conductor’s nearby voice woke me by bellowing “All aboard!” I jumped straight up out of my seat and then realized that an hour or more had passed. Sophie had not returned to her place next to me, and sudden fear wrapped itself around me like a quilt fashioned of many wet hands. I glanced into the darkness outside, saw the passing sparkle of tunnel lights, and knew that we were leaving Baltimore. It might have been a normal two-minute struggle to the other end of the car, pressing and shoving past the bellies and rumps of fifty standees, but I made it in a few seconds, actually knocking a small child down. In senseless dread I pounded at the door of the women’s lavatory—what made me think she was still in there? A fat Negro woman with wild wiglike hair and bright marigold powder on her jowls stuck her face out and shrilled, “Git outa here! You crazy?” I plunged on.
In the swanker regions of the train I was enveloped by moist Muzak. The elderly-auntie strains of Percy Grainger’s Country Gardens followed me as I frantically peered into roomette after roomette, hoping that Sophie had strayed into one and perhaps gone to sleep. I was now alternately obsessed by the notion that she had gotten off in Baltimore and that—Oh shit, the other was even more unthinkable. I opened the doors of more lavatories, stalked the funereal plush reaches of four or five parlor cars, hopefully scanned the diner where white-aproned colored waiters flapped their way up and down the aisle through fumes fragrant with stale cooking oil. At last: the club car. A little desk, a cash register—its custodian a pleasant gray-haired middle-aged woman who gazed up from her work with mournful eyes.
“Yes, poor dear,” she said after I had blurted the queasy question, “she was hunting for a telephone. Imagine, on a train! She wanted to call Brooklyn. Poor dear, she was crying. She seemed, well, a little drunk. She went that way.”
I found Sophie at the end of the car, which was a bleak cage of a vestibule, clangingly noisy, that was also the end of the train. A padlocked glass door crisscrossed by wire mesh looked down on the receding rails that glittered in the late-morning sun and converged at a point marking infinity amid the green pinewoods of Maryland. She was sitting on the floor slumped against the wall, her yellow hair adrift in the windy draft, and in one hand she clutched the bottle. As in that swim to oblivion weeks before