Sophie's Choice - William Styron [64]
But somehow she was able to take hold of herself and push the morbid thought back into the far recesses of her mind. Drawing away slightly from the mirror, she caught a narcissistic gleam of her familiar beauty, dwelling persistently beneath the white mask, and this gave her a long moment of comfort. It was the day of her English lesson at Brooklyn College, and in order to become fortified for the dreadful trip by subway and for the session itself, she made herself eat. It was a task accompanied by waves of nausea, but she knew she had to force it down: the eggs and the bacon and the whole-wheat bread and the skimmed milk she assembled together listlessly in the gloom of her cramped little kitchenette. And while eating she had an inspiration—at least in part produced by the Mahler symphony playing at the moment on WQXR’s midday concert. For no clear reason a series of somber chords, struck in the middle of the symphony’s andante movement, reminded her of the remarkable poem which had been read to her at the end of her last English class, a few days before, by the teacher, an ardent, fat, patient and conscientious young graduate student known to the class as Mr. Youngstein. Doubtless because of her proficiency in other tongues, Sophie was far and away the prize student among this motley of striving scholars, a polyglot group but mainly Yiddish-speaking refugees from all the destroyed corners of Europe; her excellence had no doubt attracted Mr. Youngstein to her, although Sophie was hardly so lacking in self-awareness as to be unmindful of the fact that her simple physical presence might have worked upon the young man its plainly troubling effect.
Flustered and bashful, he was obviously smitten by her, but had made no advances other than to suggest awkwardly each day that she remain for a few moments after class so that he might read her what he called some “representative American verse.” This he would do in a nervous voice, slowly intoning the lines from Whitman and Poe and Frost and others in hoarse, unmusical but clearly enunciated syllables, while she listened with great care, touched often and deeply by this poetry which from time to time brought exciting new nuances of meaning to the language, and by Mr. Youngstein’s clumsy and grasping passion for her, expressed in faun-gazes of yearning from behind his monstrous prismlike spectacles. She found herself both warmed and distressed by this callow, transfixed infatuation and could really respond only to the poetry, for besides being, at twenty or so, at least ten years younger than she was, he was also physically unappealing—that is, enormously overweight aside from his grotesquely disoriented eyes. His feeling for these poets, though, was so profound, so genuine that he could scarcely fail to communicate much of their essence, and Sophie had been captured in particular by the haunted melody of one verse, which began:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
She adored hearing Mr. Youngstein read the poem and wanted actually to read it herself in her much improved English, along with the poet’s other works, so that she might commit it to memory. But there was a small confusion. She had missed one of the teacher’s inflections. Sophie had understood that this brief poem, this enchanted, simply wrought vision with its thronging sound of the eternal, was the handiwork of an American poet whose last name was identical to that of one of the immortal novelists of the world. And so in her room at Yetta’s, reminded of the poem again today by those somber chords of Mahler, she decided to go before class began to the Brooklyn