Sophie's Choice - William Styron [13]
“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. “Please go ahead,” I said again.
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