Sophie's Choice - William Styron [300]
Hotel employees certainly must come face to face with a lot of weird ones. But I still wonder what went through the mind of the grandfatherly desk clerk at the Hotel Congress, not far from our nation’s Capitol, when he confronted the young Reverend Wilbur Entwistle, wearing a distinctly unecclesiastical seersucker suit but conspicuously carrying a Bible, and his violently rumpled fair-haired wife, who muttered disconnectedly in a foreign accent during the registration process, her face potty with train soot and tears, and clearly blotto. In the end he doubtless took it in his stride, for I had worked out a camouflage. Despite my informal dress, the masquerade I had contrived seemed as effective as one could imagine. In the 1940s unmarried people were not permitted to check into the same hotel room together; in addition, it was a felonious risk to falsely register as man and wife. The hazard increased if the lady was drunk. Desperate, I knew I was taking a risk, but it was one that seemed minimized if I could cast over it a modest halo of sanctimony. Therefore, there was the black leather Bible which I fished out of my suitcase just before the train pulled into Union Station, and also there was the address I inscribed in a large hand on the register, as if to decisively validate my dulcet-voiced and unguentary ministerial bearing: Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. I was relieved to see that my ruse served to distract the clerk’s attention from Sophie; the dewlapped old gentleman, being Southern (like so many Washington hirelings), was impressed by my credentials and also had a Southerner’s genial garrulousness: “Have a nice stay, Reverend, you and the missus. What denomination you a preacher in?”
I was about to reply “Presbyterian,” but he had begun to ramble on like a beagle hound softly barking down the ravines of godly fellowship. “Me, I’m a Baptist, fifteen years I’ve attended the Second Baptist Church of Washington, mighty fine preacher we’ve got there now, Reverend Wilcox, maybe you’ve heard of him. Comes from Fluvanna County, Virginia, where I was born and raised, though of course he’s a much younger man.” As I began to edge away, with Sophie clinging heavily to my arm, the clerk rang for the single sleepy Negro bellboy and handed me a card. “You like good seafood, Reverend? Try this restaurant down on the waterfront. It’s called Herzog’s. Best crab cakes in town.” And when we approached the aged elevator with its stained pea-green doors, he persisted: “Entwistle. You wouldn’t be related to the Entwistles down around Powhatan County, would you, Reverend?” I was back in the South.
The Hotel Congress breathed an air of troisième classe. The cubbyhole of a room we took for seven dollars was drab and stifling, and its exposure on a nondescript back street let in feeble light from the midday sun. Sophie, wobbling and desperate for sleep, plunged onto the bed even before the bellboy had deposited our bags on a rickety stand and accepted my twenty-five cents. I opened a window upon a ledge calcimine with pigeon droppings, and a warm October breeze suddenly freshened the room. Far off I could hear the clangor and muffled hoots of the trains at Union Station, while from some nearer source there came ruffles and flourishes, trumpets, cymbals, the piping self-esteem of a military band. A couple of flies made a bloated buzzing in the shadows near the ceiling.
I lay down next to Sophie on the bed, which had become unsprung in the middle, not so much allowing me as forcing me to roll toward her, as in the bosom of some shallow hammock, and on top of threadbare bedclothes that exuded a faint musky chlorinated smell either of laundry bleach or semen, perhaps both. Almost total exhaustion and worry over Sophie