Sophie's Choice - William Styron [67]
Sophie must have lost consciousness once more, for the next thing she remembered was Nathan’s gentle, strong and marvelously expressive fingers streaked, to her intense discomfort, with slimy smears of her own vomit yet endlessly consoling and reassuring as they lightly applied something wet and cool to her brow. “You’re all right, honey,” he whispered, “you’re going to be all right. Just don’t worry about anything. Ah-h, you’re so beautiful, how did you get to be so beautiful? Don’t move now, you’re all right, you just had a funny little spell. Just lie still, let the doctor take care of everything. There, how does that feel? Want a little sip of water? No, no, don’t try to say anything, just relax, you’re going to be all well in just a minute.” On and on the voice went, a gentle monologue, lulling, soothing, murmurously infusing her with a sense of repose; it was a soft refrain so sedative indeed that soon she was no longer even embarrassed that the hands of this stranger were greenly stained with her own sour juices, and somehow she regretted that the one thought she had expressed to him, when she had first opened her eyes, had been the impossibly foolish Oh, I think I’m going to die. “No, you’re not going to die,” he was saying again in that voice filled with its infinite and patient strength, as the fingers brought exquisite coolness to her brow, “you’re not going to die, you’ll live to be a hundred. What’s your name, sweetie? No, don’t tell me now, just lie still and look beautiful. Your pulse is fine, steady. There, try this little sip of water...”
Chapter Five
IT MUST HAVE BEEN a couple of weeks after settling comfortably into my pink lodgings that I received another communication from my father. It was a fascinating letter in itself, although I could hardly realize then what bearing it would ultimately have upon my relationship with Sophie and Nathan and the scrambled events that took place later on in the summer. Like the last of his letters I quoted—the one about Maria Hunt—this message had to do with a death, and like the earlier one concerning Artiste, it brought me news of what might be considered something in the nature of a legacy, or a share in one. I set down most of it here:
Son, ten days ago my dear friend and political & philosophical antagonist Frank Hobbs dropped dead at his office in the shipyard. It was a swift, I should say almost instantaneous cerebral thrombosis. He was only 60, an age I have begun desperately to perceive as being virtually in life’s springtide. His passing was a great shock to me and I feel the loss deeply. His politics of course were deplorable, situating him I should say about 10 miles to the right of Mussolini, but withal he was what we who originated in the country have always termed a “good ole boy” and I shall miss intensely his hulking, generous albeit bigoted presence as we drove to work. He was in many ways a tragic man, lonely, a widower, and still mourning the death of his only child, Frank Jr., who you may remember drowned while still in his twenties not long ago in a fishing accident down on Albemarle Sound. Frank Sr. left no survivors, and that fact is central to this letter and to the reason I am writing you at some length.
Frank’s lawyer called me up several days ago to inform me, to my enormous astonishment, that I am the chief beneficiary of his estate. Frank had little money saved and no investments, having been like myself only a high class wage-earner within or perhaps I should say astride the precarious back of the monstrous leviathan known as American business. Thus I regret I do not bring you tidings of the imminent receipt of a fat check to lighten your worries as you labor in the literary vineyard. For many years, however, Frank had been the owner and absentee landlord of a small peanut farm over in Southampton County, a place that was in the Hobbs family ever since the Civil War. It is this farm that Frank left to me, stating in his