Sophie's Choice - William Styron [13]
Farrell poured himself another huge shot of rye. He had become quite drunk and his speech was a little slurred, the freckled indoor face sad and haggard in the waning light. “Oh, it’s true that a man can live out his own aspirations through the life of his child. Eddie went to Columbia, and one of the things that thrilled me was the way he took to books, his gift for words. At nineteen—nineteen, mind you—he had had a sketch published in The New Yorker, and Whit Burnett had taken a story for Story. One of the youngest contributors, I believe, in the history of the magazine. It was his eye, you see, his eye.” Farrell jabbed his forefinger at his eye. “He saw things, you understand, saw things that the rest of us don’t see and made them fresh and alive. Mark Van Doren wrote me a lovely note—the loveliest note, really—saying that Eddie had one of the greatest natural writing gifts of any student he’d ever had. Mark Van Doren, imagine! Quite a tribute, wouldn’t you say?” He eyed me as if in search for some corroboration.
“Quite a tribute,” I agreed.
“And then—and then in 1943 he joined the Marine Corps. Said he’d rather join up than be drafted. He honestly loved the glamour of the marines, although basically he was too sensitive to have any illusions about war. War!” He spoke the word with revulsion, like a seldom-used obscenity, and paused for an instant to shut his eyes and to nod in pain. Then he looked at me and said, “The war took him to the Pacific and he was in some of the worst of the fighting. You should read his letters, marvelous, jolly, eloquent letters, without a trace of self-pity. He never once doubted that he’d come home and go back to Columbia and finish up and then become the writer he was meant to be. And then two years ago he was on Okinawa and got hit by a sniper. In the head. It was July and they were mopping up. I think he must have been one of the last marines to die in the war. He’d made corporal. He won the Bronze Star. I don’t know why it happened. God, I don’t know why it happened! God, why?”
Farrell was weeping, not obtrusively but with the sparkling, honest tears welling up at the edge of his eyelids, and I turned away with such a feeling of shame and humiliation that years later I am able to recapture the slightly fevered, faintly nauseous sensation that swept over me. This may now be difficult to explain, for the passage of thirty years and the fatigue and cynicism engendered by several barbaric American wars might make my reaction appear to be hopelessly old-fashioned and romantic. But the fact remains that I, too, had been a marine like Eddie Farrell, had, like Eddie, burned to be a writer and had sent letters home from the Pacific that were inscribed in my heart’s blood, written with the same weird amalgam of passion, humor, despair and exquisite hope that can only be set down by very young men haunted by the imminent appearance of death. Even more wrenching to recount, I, too, had come to Okinawa only days after Eddie had perished (who knows, I have often wondered, perhaps scant hours after he took his mortal wound), to encounter no enemy, no fear, no danger at all, but, through the grace of history, a wrecked yet peaceful Oriental landscape across which I would wander unscathed and unthreatened during the last few weeks before Hiroshima. I had, in bitter truth, heard not a shot fired in anger, and although in terms of my hide, at least, I was fortune’s darling if there ever was one, I could never get over the feeling that I had been deprived of something terrible and magnificent. Certainly in regard to this experience—or my lack of it—nothing ever pierced me so deeply as Farrell’s brief, desolating story of his son Eddie, who seemed to me immolated on the earth of Okinawa that I might live—and write. As Farrell sat weeping in the twilight, I felt foreshortened, shriveled, and could say nothing.
Farrell rose, dabbing at his eyes, and stood by the window gazing out at the sun-encrimsoned Hudson, where the dingy outlines of two great ships moved sluggishly seaward toward the Narrows. The spring wind whistled with the noise of demons around McGraw-Hill