Sophie's Choice - William Styron [335]
My stomach was in poor enough shape anyway, also my general equilibrium. After the train ride up from Washington, I had experienced hardly a moment’s sobriety or a moment’s sleep. I had been left a pacing, driven, gritty-eyed insomniac by what had happened; and since sleep would not come, I had filled the unholy hours—in which I had skulked about the streets and into the bars of Flatbush, murmuring “Why, why, why?”—with obsessive guzzling, mostly beer, which kept me marginally but not completely drunk. I was half drunk and undergoing the queerest sense of dislocation and exhaustion (prelude to what might have been true alcoholic hallucinosis, I later realized) I had ever felt when I sank into one of Walter B. Cooke’s commercial pews and listened to Reverend DeWitt “sermonize” above Nathan’s and Sophie’s coffins. It was not really Larry’s fault about the Reverend DeWitt. He felt that he needed a clergyman of some kind, but a rabbi seemed inappropriate, a priest unacceptable—so a friend of his, or a friend of a friend, suggested Reverend DeWitt. He was a Universalist, a man in his forties, with a synthetically serene face, wavy blond, carefully groomed hair and pinkly mobile, rather girlish lips. He wore a tan business suit with a tan vest tucked around his nascent paunch, upon which glittered the golden key of Omicron Delta Kappa, the college leadership fraternity.
I made then my first half-dotty, audible chuckle, causing a small stir among the people nearest me. I had never seen that key worn by anyone much over my own age, especially beyond the bounds of a campus, and it added a further touch of ludicrousness to a person I already had detested on sight. And how Nathan would have howled at this watery newt of a goy! Slouched down next to Morty Haber in the gloom, inhaling the syrupy fragrance of calla lilies, I decided that the Reverend DeWitt, more than any person I had ever encountered, summoned up in me all my homicidal potential. He droned on insultingly, invoking Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dale Carnegie, Spinoza, Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud. He mentioned Christ once, in rather distant terms—not that I minded. I sank lower and lower in my stall, and began to tune him out as one cancels sound with the dial of a radio, allowing my mind to capture drowsily only the plumpest and moistest platitudes. These lost children. Victims of an age of rampant materialism. Loss of universal values. Failure of the old-fashioned principles of self-reliance. Inability to intercommunicate!
“What fucking bullshit!” I thought, then realized that I had spoken the words aloud, for I felt Morty Haber’s hand tap my leg and heard his gentle “Shh-h!” which mingled with a half-stifled laugh to make it plain that he agreed with me. I must have nodded off then—not into sleep but into some cataleptic realm where all thoughts scamper away like truants from the brain—because my next sensation was the horrible sight of the two gun-metal coffins being wheeled up the aisle past me on their sparkling trolleys.
“I think I’m going to vomit,” I said, too loud.
“Shh-h,” said Morty.
Before embarking for the cemetery in the limousine, I slipped into a nearby bar and bought a large cardboard container of beer. One could obtain a quart for thirty-five cents in those days. I was aware of my probable tactlessness, but no one seemed to mind, and I was quite stiff by the time we got to the burial ground just beyond Hempstead.