Sophie's Choice - William Styron [12]
“No, what was it?”
“It was for The Saturday Evening Post. A little anecdote I sent in regarding a vacation that my wife and I took in Quebec. Not worth describing. But I got two hundred dollars for it, and for several days I was the happiest writer in America. Ah, well...” A great melancholy appeared to overtake him, and his voice trailed off. “I got sidetracked,” he murmured.
I did not know quite how to respond to his mood, which seemed perilously near grief, and could only say, as I continued to stuff things into my briefcase, “Well, I hope we can somehow keep in touch.” I knew, however, that we would not keep in touch.
“I do too,” Farrell said. “I wish we had gotten to know each other better.” Gazing down into his glass, he fell into a silence which became so prolonged that it began to make me nervous. “I wish we had gotten to know each other better,” he repeated slowly at last. “I had often thought to ask you to come to my home out in Queens for dinner, but I always put it off. Sidetracked again. You remind me very much of my son, you know.”
“I didn’t know you had a son,” I said with some surprise. I had heard Farrell once allude casually and wryly to his “childless state” and had simply assumed that he had not, as the phrase goes, been blessed with issue. But my curiosity had ceased there. In the McGraw-Hill atmosphere of gelid impersonality it was considered an effrontery, if not downright dirty, to express even mild interest in the private lives of others. “I thought you—” I began.
“Oh, I had a son all right!” His voice was suddenly a cry, startling me with its mingled tone of rage and lament. The Overholt had unloosed in him all the Celtic furies with which he had consorted daily in the desolate time after five in the afternoon. He rose to his feet and wandered to the window, gazing through the twilight at the incomprehensible mirage of Manhattan, set afire by the descending sun. “Oh, I had a son!” he said again. “Edward Christian Farrell. He was just your age, he was just twenty-two, and he wanted to be a writer. He was... he was a prince with language, my son was. He had a gift that would have charmed the devil himself, and some of the letters he wrote—some of those long, knowing, funny, intelligent letters—were the loveliest that ever were written. Oh, he was a prince with the language, that boy!”
Tears came to his eyes. For me it was a paralyzingly awkward moment, one that appears now and then throughout life, though with merciful infrequency. In grieving tones a near-stranger speaks of some beloved person in the past tense, throwing his listener into a quandary. Certainly he means the departed is dead. But hold! Mightn’t he simply have run off, victim of amnesia, or become a fleeing culprit? Or was now pathetically languishing in a lunatic asylum, so that use of the past tense is merely sorrowfully euphemistic? When Farrell resumed talking, still offering me no clue to his son’s fate, I turned away in embarrassment and continued to sort out my belongings.
“Maybe I could have taken it better if he hadn’t been my only kid. But Mary and I could have no more children after Eddie was born.” He stopped suddenly. “Ah, you don’t want to hear...”
I turned back to him. “No, go ahead,” I said, “please.” He seemed to be suffering from an urgent need to talk, and since he was a kindly man whom I liked and, furthermore, one who in some fashion had indeed identified me with his son, I felt it would have been indecent for me not to encourage him to unburden himself.