hell’s pandemonium. “Ich kann nicht wählen!”
she screamed.
The doctor was aware of unwanted atten-
tion. “shut up!” he ordered. “hurry now and
choose. choose, goddamnit, or i’ll send them
both over there. Quick!”
“don’t make me choose,” she heard herself
plead in a whisper, “i can’t choose.”
“send them both over there, then,” the
doctor said to the aide, “nach links.”
“Mama!” she heard eva’s thin but soar-
ing cry at the instant that she thrust the child
away from her and rose from the concrete with
a clumsy stumbling motion. “take the baby!”
she called out. “take my little girl!”
William Styron, from sophie’s choice. Having
served in the marines in the Pacific at the end
of World War II, Styron graduated from Duke
University in 1947 and took a copyediting and
blurb-writing job in New York City, from which he
was reportedly fired for flying paper airplanes. He
published his first novel, lie down in darkness,
in 1951 and wrote the introductory essay for the first
paris review two years later. He received a Pulitzer
Prize for The confessions of nat turner in 1968.
Styron died at the age of eighty-one in 2006.
“Don’t Forget Them, Son,” 102-year-old veteran Bill Cotgrove and his grandson at a military cemetery,
Belgium,1998. Photograph by Brian Moody.
