Sophie's Choice - William Styron [334]
Two white-jacketed morgue attendants entered the room with a rustle of plastic bags. The other piece of music was one that both Sophie and Nathan had listened to all summer long. I don’t want to give it a larger connotation than it deserves, for Sophie and Nathan had fled faith. But the record had been on the top of the stack, and I could not help making this instinctive conjecture as I replaced it, assuming that in their final anguish—or ecstasy, or whatever engulfing revelation may have united them just before the darkness—the sound they heard was Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.
These final entries should be called, I suppose, something like “A Study in the Conquest of Grief.”
We buried Sophie and Nathan side by side in a cemetery in Nassau County. It was less difficult to get organized than one might have imagined. Because there had been worries. After all, a Jew and a Catholic in a “suicide pact” (as the Daily News termed it, in a garishly illustrated story on page three), unmarried lovers dwelling in sin, suggestive beauty and good looks, the instigator of the tragedy a young man with a history of psychotic episodes, and so on—this was the stuff of superscandal in the year 1947. One could envision all sorts of objections to a double burial. But the ceremony was relatively easy to arrange (and Larry arranged it all) because there were no strict religious injunctions to observe. Nathan and Larry’s parents had been Orthodox Jews, but the mother was dead and the father, now in his eighties, was in precarious health and quite senile. Furthermore—and why not face it? we said—Sophie had no closer relative than Nathan. These considerations made it all the more reasonable for Larry to settle on the rites that were held that following Monday. Neither Larry nor Nathan had been inside a synagogue for years. And I told Larry, when he asked my advice, that I thought Sophie would not have wanted a priest or any ministrations of her church—perhaps a blasphemous assumption, and one that consigned Sophie to hell, but I was certain (and still am) that I was correct. In the afterlife Sophie would be able to endure any hell.
So at a downtown outpost of Walter B. Cooke we had obsequies that were as civilized and decent as were possible under the circumstances, with their accompanying whiff (to the public that goggled outside, at least) of dirty and fatal passion. We were to have a little trouble regarding the officiating divine; he was a disaster, but I was happily unaware of this as I stood with Larry that afternoon, greeting the mourners. There was only a small group of these. The first to arrive was the older Landau sister, married to a surgeon. She had flown from St. Louis with her teen-age son. The two expensively dressed chiropractors, Blackstock and Katz, came with a couple of youngish women who had worked with Sophie in the office; they were weeping blindly and had drawn faces and pink noses. Yetta Zimmerman, teetering on prostration, arrived with Morris Fink and the fat rabbinical student Moishe Muskatblit, who was helping to support Yetta but who from his drained, wheylike face and uncertain gait looked in need of support himself.
A handful of Nathan and Sophie’s friends turned up—six or seven of the young professionals and teachers at Brooklyn College who comprised what I had called the “Morty Haber group,” including Morty himself. He was a soft-spoken, gentle scholar. I had come to know him slightly and like him, and I attached myself