Sophie's Choice (Open Road) by Styron William

Author:Styron, William [Styron, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Novel
ISBN: 9781936317196
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2010-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“SON THE NORTH BELIEVES it has a veritable patent on virtue,” my father said, gingerly stroking with a forefinger his shiny new black eye. “But of course, the North is wrong. Do you think the slums of Harlem truly represent an advance for the Negro over a peanut patch in Southampton County? Do you think the Negro is going to remain content in that insufferable squalor? Son, someday the North is going to sadly rue these hypocritical attempts at magnanimity, these clever and transparent gestures that go by the name of tolerance. Someday—mark my word—it will be clearly demonstrated that the North is every bit as steeped in prejudice as the South, if not more so. At least in the South the prejudice is out in the open. But up here...” He paused to touch his sore eye again. “I really shudder to think of the violence and hatred building up in these slums.” An almost lifelong Southern liberal, conscious of the South’s injustices, my father had never been given to shifting unreasonably the various racial evils of the South onto the shoulders of the North; with some surprise, therefore, I listened to him attentively, unaware—during that summer of 1947—of just how prophetic his words were to prove.

At some time long past midnight we were sitting in the dim, murmurously convivial bar of the Hotel McAlpin, where I had taken him after the disastrous altercation he had had with a cabdriver named Thomas McGuire, Hack License 8608, only an hour or so after his arrival in New York. The old man (I use the phrase merely in the paternal-vernacular sense; at age fifty-nine he looked strappingly fit and youthful) had not been badly damaged but there had been a considerable uproar and a crimson outpouring of alarming, albeit harmlessly let, blood from a superficial cut on the brow. This had necessitated a small bandage. After order had been restored, and as we sat drinking (he bourbon, I that steadfast spirit of my nonage—Rheingold) and talking, largely about the gulf which separated this devil’s spawn of an urban blight north of the Chesapeake and the South’s Elysian meadows (in this realm my father could scarcely have been less prophetic, not having foreseen Atlanta), I was able more than once to reflect somberly on how my old man’s imbroglio with Thomas McGuire had at least allowed me momentary diversion from my newly acquired despair.

For, it may be recalled, all this would necessarily have taken place only brief hours after that moment in Brooklyn when I had assumed that Sophie and Nathan had disappeared from my life forever. Certainly I was convinced—since I had no reason to think otherwise—that I would never lay eyes on her again. And so the melancholy which had taken hold of me when I left Yetta Zimmerman’s and journeyed by subway to stay with my father in Manhattan had been as close to creating an excruciating physical malaise as any I had ever known—most surely since my mother’s death.

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