Sophie's Choice - William Styron [89]
But if the dinner, though excellent in itself, was mainly restorative, the wine was ambrosial. In the household of her early youth, in Cracow, Sophie had grown up with wine, her father having possessed a strain of hedonism which caused him to insist (in a country as barren of vineyards as Montana) that her mother’s ample and often elegant Viennese meals be accompanied with some regularity by the fine wines of Austria and the Hungarian plains. But the war, which had swept so much else out of her life, had obliterated such a simple pleasure as wine, and since then she had not bothered to go out of her way to drink any, even if she had been tempted to within the purlieus of Flatbush, its constituency pledged to Mogen David. But she had no notion of this—this gods’ liquor! The bottle Nathan brought was of such a quality as to make Sophie want to redefine the nature of taste; ignorant of the mystique of French wine, she did not need to be told by Nathan that it was a Châateau-Margaux, or that it was a 1937—the last of the great prewar vintages—or that it cost the flabbergasting sum of fourteen dollars (roughly half her salary for a week, she noted with incredulity as she caught a glimpse of the price on the sticker), or that it might have gained in bouquet had there been time to decant it first. Nathan went on and on divertingly about such matters. But she only knew that the savor of it gave her an unparalleled sense of delight, a luscious and reckless and great-hearted warmth that spread downward to her toes, validating all quaint and ancient maxims as to the healing properties of wine. Light-headed, woozy, she heard herself say to her provider toward the end of the meal, “You know, when you live a good life like a saint and die, that must be what they make you to drink in paradise.” To which Nathan made no direct reply, appearing to be pleasantly mellow himself as he peered at her gravely and thoughtfully through the ruby dregs of his glass. “Not ‘to drink,’ ” he corrected her gently, “just ‘make you drink.’ ” Then he added, “Forgive me. I’m a confirmed and frustrated schoolmaster.”
Then after dinner was over and they had washed the dishes together they sat down opposite each other in the two uncomfortable straight-backed chairs with which at that time the room was furnished. Suddenly Nathan’s attention was caught by the handful of books in a row on a shelf above Sophie’s bed—the Polish translations of Hemingway and Wolfe and Dreiser and Farrell. Rising for a moment, he examined the books curiously. He said some things which made her feel that he was familiar with these writers; he spoke with special enthusiasm of Dreiser, telling her that in college he had read straight through the enormous length of An American Tragedy in a single sitting, “nearly putting my eyes out in the process,” and then in the midst of a rhapsodic description of Sister Carrie, which she had not yet read but which he insisted that she do (assuring her that it was Dreiser’s masterpiece), he stopped short in mid-sentence and gazed at her with a pop-eyed clownish look that made her laugh, and said, “You know, I haven’t the faintest notion of who you are. What do you do, Polish baby?”
She paused for a long time before replying, “I work for a doctor, part time. I am his receptionist.”
“A doctor?” he said, clearly with great interest. “What kind of a doctor? “
She sensed that she was having enormous difficulty in getting the word out. But finally she said it. “He’s a—a chiropractor.”
Sophie could almost see the spasm that went through his entire body at the sound of what she had said. “A chiropractor. A chiropractor! No wonder