Sophie's Choice - William Styron [90]
She found herself trying to make a foolish and lame excuse. “He’s a very nice man...” she began. “He’s what you call”—resorting suddenly to Yiddish—“a mensh. His name is Dr. Blackstock.”
“Mensh, shmensh,” he said with a look of deep distaste, “a girl like you, working for some humbug—”
“It was the only job I could get, when I come here,” she put in. “It was all I could do!” Now she felt herself speaking with some irritation and feeling, and either what she said or the sudden brusque way she said it caused him to mutter a quick apology. “I know,” he said, “I shouldn’t say that. It’s none of my business.”
“I would like something better, but I have no talents.” She spoke more calmly now. “I begun an education, you see, a long time ago, but it never was finished. I am, you see, a very uncomplete person. I wished somehow to teach, to teach music, to become a teacher of music—but this was impossible. So I am a receptionist in this office. It’s not so bad, vraiment—although I would like to do something better one day.”
“I’m so sorry for what I said.”
She gazed at him, touched by the discomfort he seemed to suffer over his own maladroitness. In as long as she could remember she had never met anyone to whom she was so immediately drawn. There was something so appealingly intense, energetic and various about Nathan—his quiet but firm domination, his mimicry, his comic bluster about things culinary and medical, which, she felt, was the thinnest disguise for his real concern for her health. And at last this awkward vulnerability and self-reproach, which in some remote and indefinable way reminded her of a small boy. For an instant she wished he would touch her again, then the feeling went away. They were both silent for a long moment as a car slithered by on the street outside where a light rain was falling and the evening chimes from the distant church dropped nine notes on Brooklyn’s vast, reverberant midsummer stillness. Far off, thunder rolled faintly over Manhattan. It had become dark and Sophie switched on her solitary table lamp.
Perhaps it was only the seraphic wine or Nathan’s calm and uninhibiting presence, but she felt the urge not to halt where she had left off but to continue talking, and as she talked she felt her English moving more or less smoothly and with nearly unhampered authority, as if through remarkably efficient conduits she hardly knew she possessed. “I have nothing left from the past. Nothing at all. So that is one of the reasons why, you see, I feel so uncomplete. Everything you see in this room is American, new—books, my clothes, everything—there is nothing at all that remains from Poland, from the time when I was young. I don’t even have a picture from that time. One thing I much regret about losing is that album of photographs I once had. If I only had been able to keep it, I could show you so many interesting things—how it was in Cracow before the war. My father was a professor at the university but he was also a very talented photographer—an amateur, but very good, you know, very sensitive. He had a very expensive fantastic Leica. I remember one of the pictures he take that was in this album, one of his best ones that I so regret to lose, was of me and my mother sitting at the piano. I was about thirteen then. We must have been playing a composition for four hands. We looked so happy, I remember, my mother and me. Now, somehow, just the memory of that photograph is a symbol for me, a symbol of what was and could have been and now cannot be.” She paused, inwardly proud of her fluidly shifting tenses, and glanced up at Nathan, who had leaned forward slightly, totally absorbed by her sudden outpouring. “You must see clearly, I do not pity myself. There are far worse things than being unable to finish a career, not to become what one had planned to be. If that was all I had ever lost, I would be completely content. It would have been wonderful for me to have had the career in music that I thought I would have. But I was prevented. It is seven, eight years since I have read a note