Sophie's Choice - William Styron [336]
In one of the Cadillacs, sitting next to Morty, I leafed through the Untermeyer American poetry anthology I had brought along, together with my notebook. I had suggested to Larry that I read something, and he had liked the idea. I was determined that before our last leave-taking Sophie and Nathan would hear my voice; the indecency of the Reverend DeWitt having the final word was more than I could abide, and so I thumbed diligently through the section generously allotted to Emily Dickinson, in search of the loveliest statement I could find. I recalled how, at the Brooklyn College library, it had been Emily who had brought Nathan and Sophie together; I thought it fitting that she should also bid them farewell. Euphoric, inebriate glee welled up in me irresistibly when I found the appropriate, or, should I say, perfect poem; I was softly cackling to myself at the moment that the limousine rolled up to the graveside and I spilled myself out of the car, nearly sprawling on the grass.
The Reverend DeWitt’s requiem at the cemetery was a capsulated version of what he had told us at the mortuary. I had the impression that Larry had hinted to him that he might do well to be brief. The minister contributed a tacky liturgical touch in the form of a phial of dust, which at the end of his talk he extracted from his pocket and emptied over the two coffins, half on Sophie’s and half on Nathan’s, six feet away. But it was not the ordinary humble dust of mortality. He told the mourners that the dust had been gathered from the six continents of the world, plus subglacial Antarctica, and represented our need to remember that death is universal, afflicting people of all creeds, colors and nationalities. Again I had a wrenching remembrance of how in his lucid periods Nathan had so little patience for DeWitt’s brand of imbecility. With what joy he would have mocked and skewered, on the genius of his mimicry, this ponderous charlatan. But Larry was nodding in my direction, and I stepped forward. In the stillness of the hot, bright afternoon the only sound was a soft thrumming of bees, lured by the flowers banked at the edge of the two graves. Wobbling and rather numb now, I thought of Emily, and bees, and their immensity in her song, their buzzing metaphor of eternity.
“Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.”
I hesitated for some time before I continued. I had no trouble shaping the words, but hilarity halted me, this time mixed with grief. Wasn’t there some inexpressible meaning in the fact that my entire experience of Sophie and Nathan was circumscribed by a bed, from the moment—which now seemed centuries past—when I first heard them above me in the glorious circus of their lovemaking to the final tableau on that same bed, whose image would stay with me until dotage or my own death erased it from my mind? I think it was then that I began to feel myself falter and fail, and break slowly apart.
“Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.”
Many pages ago I mentioned the love-hate relationship I maintained toward the journal I kept in those days of my youth. The vivid and valuable passages—the ones which in general I refrained from throwing away—seemed to me later to be the ones having to do with my emasculations, my thwarted manhood