Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [33]
DEAR WILLIE:
By the time you read this letter, I think I will be dead. I’m sorry to startle you but I suppose there’s no pleasant way to break such news. The trouble I’ve been having with my toe is due to a rather vicious disorder, malignant melanoma. The prognosis is one hundred per cent bad. I’ve known about my condition for a long time, and figured that I would probably die this summer. But the toe began to go a bit sooner. I suppose I should be in a hospital at this moment (two nights before you leave) but I hate to spoil your departure, and since there’s no hope anyway, I’ve postponed it. I’m going to try to stall until I know you’ve left San Francisco. Your mother doesn’t know anything yet. My guess is that I won’t last more than three or four weeks, now.
I’m a little young to go, according to the insurance tables, and i must say I don’t feel ready, but I daresay that’s because I’ve accomplished so little. I look back on my life, Willie, and there’s not much there. Your mother has been a fine wife, and I have no regrets on that score. But I seem to have led such a thoroughly second-rate life-not only compared to my father, but in view of my own capabilities. I had quite a feeling for research. When I fell in love with your mother I thought I couldn’t marry her without undertaking general practice in a high-income community. It was my plan to make a pile in ten or fifteen years of such work, and then return to research. I really think I might have done something in cancer. I had a theory-a notion, you might say-nothing I could have put on paper. It needed three years of systematic investigation. Nobody has touched it to this day. I’ve kept up with the literature. My name might have meant as much as my father’s. But now there’s no time even to outline the procedure. The worst of it is, I now feel your mother would have stood by me and lived modestly if I’d really insisted.
But I’ve had a pleasant time, I can truly say that. I’ve loved reading and golf, and I’ve had all of that I wanted. The days have gone by all too fast.
I wish I might have met this girl of yours. It seems to me that she, or the Navy, or both, are having quite a good effect on you. And believe me, Willie, that is by far the brightest thought I take with me into the hospital. I’ve let slide my relationship with you as I have so many other things, through plain sloth; particularly since your mother seemed anxious to take charge of you. It’s too bad we had no more children. Just bad luck. Your mother had three miscarriages, which you may not know.
I’ll tell you a curious thing. It seems to me that I have a higher opinion of you than your mother has. She regards you as a hopeless baby who will have to be coddled through life. But I am coming to believe that though you are pretty spoiled and soft at the surface, you are tough enough at the core. After all, I see, you have always done pretty much as you pleased with your mother, while giving her the sense of ruling you. I’m sure this was no plan on your part, but you’ve done it anyway.
You’ve never had a serious problem in your life, up to this Navy experience. I watched you in the forty-eight demerits business very closely. It had its comical side, but really it was a challenge. You rose to it in an encouraging way.
Perhaps because I know I’ll never see you again I find myself sentimentalizing over you, Willie. It seems to me that you’re very much like our whole country-young, naïve, spoiled and softened by abundance and good luck, but with an interior hardness that comes from your sound stock. This country of ours consists of pioneers, after all, these new Poles and Italians and Jews as well as the older stock, people who had the gumption to get up and go and make themselves better lives in a new world. You’re going to run into a lot of strange young men in the Navy, most of them pretty